Slowly Going Bald

[For the forgetful or learning impaired, be warned again that there are of course spoilers ahead.]

Bad TV shows air all the time. Most TV is bad, and there's only so much that can be really gained from wasting ink, pixels, or breath complaining about how much "Two and a Half Men" sucks. There's no surprise there, and the arguments are almost too easy to make. But when a good show — indeed, when a great one — tumbles from its former glory and spends its last few moments gasping in a gutter unimaginably far from the heights from which it launched, then it's necessary and imperative to talk about what happened, and why. That's how "Battlestar Galactica" ended the other night, with a sputtering fall across the finish line, and I greet its resolution not with applause or joy but with the sad commitment of watching a family member finally succumb to a terminal disease. Things used to be so bright and almost transcendent, but this last season has bludgeoned the joy from the series and turned it into an exercise in how to take a fascinating fictional universe and leave it in ruins.

The entire season was one example after another of aborted storytelling and cheated narratives, but things really began to take a turn for the worse in "The Ties That Bind," which shoehorned too many subplots into one episode, one of which followed Cally from her discovery that Tyrol was a Cylon to her attempted escape with Nicky to her murder by Tory. The whole thing occupies maybe 20 minutes of screen time, and though it's an interesting idea that plays on the mercurial loyalties of the crew to each other, it's a horribly botched execution that mangles what should have taken multiple episodes to unwind. The writers and producers could have mined Cally's fear of and prejudice toward the Cylons and how she struggled to reconcile that with her unwavering love for Tyrol, which would have deepened Cally's character and put a specific face on the general atmosphere of paranoia between humans and Cylons. But none of that happened. She was killed and mourned in a cheap memorial that betrayed everything that had come before.

That's pretty much how the series finale played out, too: as a series of solid ideas ruined by execution, with creator/writer Ronald Moore clumsily swinging a wrecking ball at something that had once towered over the rest of the television landscape. The series began as a sharp, well-rendered examination of what it means to live in a just and free society; what it means to live morally when there are so few people left that laws can barely be enforced; the role of religion in government and vice versa; the slippery slope of the military-industrial complex; etc. But it ended with a suicide mission to save Hera, a human-Cylon hybrid whose importance is never fully explained or sold to the viewers. Cavil believes her genetic code contains the keys to Cylon salvation, now that they've had their resurrection hub destroyed, and her blood did beat back President Roslin's cancer for a while. But Adama never managed to make his decision to save Hera convincing, mostly because her value was never firmly established. Yes, the theory of her relevance was constantly pushed, like when her abstract doodles turned out to be the sheet music to the "Galactica" universe's version of "All Along the Watchtower," whose notes can be turned into mathematical equations that plot the course to Earth. (As embarrassed as you are to read that, I felt even worse typing it.) But Hera was always a thing, never a person; she never said a word, just sat there looking beatific and trying to look like she wasn't a randomly invented plot point that suddenly had to become meaningful.

What's more, the flip side to Hera's existence as a narrative place-holder is that the Galactica's final mission wasn't one to save Earth (or New Earth), or defeat the Cylons once and for all, or to rescue their own society. It was to do something that just didn't carry as much emotional weight. The effects and presentation were still fantastic, despite the fact that the Cylon Colony existed on the edge of a black hole that was mentioned and then dropped. (Regular readers will now how much I hate it when movies or TV series break the Chekhov's gun rule.) But the sequence couldn't hold a candle to Adama's decision to ride to the rescue at the beginning of Season Three, when he jumped Galactica into atmosphere above New Caprica and launched a Viper barrage to save the imprisoned colonists. That earlier scene had better action and suspense precisely because it was anchored to a greater emotional outcome, namely, the survival of humanity. How would that have changed if Hera had been left behind? Starbuck already knew the jump coordinates, or arrived at them without again consulting the child. What purpose did she serve?

Similarly, almost nothing was gained by the flashbacks to Caprica before the fall, unless someone out there really wanted to see Adama puke on himself again. The characters' personalities weren't advanced in any way — Tigh still likes booze and strippers! No shit! — and whatever sense of destiny or fate for which Moore may very well have been striving was smothered under the weight of a bad soap opera. The only revelation about those scenes was Gaius Baltar's shame in his blue-collar father and how that pushed him to change himself, a moment that actually came home with tender resonance when he was striking out for a homestead on New Earth and broke into tears when confessing to Caprica Six that he did indeed know a little about farming. (I'm still too frustrated to begin to address the way Starbuck up and disappeared, having apparently been a corporeal projection of her own consciousness created after her death on Earth and whose sole purpose was not, as had been foretold many times, to lead humanity to its destruction but instead to guide them to a new home. Gah.) It's accurate moments like that one that made the finale so disappointing, and have soured me on the ending. The show got close to greatness, but wound up breaking my heart and making me actively upset about its resolution. Only love could inspire such displeasure.

And oh, that resolution. Having the surviving members of the human race wind up in our collective past was a nice touch that underscored the cyclical nature of the series' mythology, but though that also meant that the cycle of war they tried to break had pretty obviously failed, Moore rammed the point home by skipping forward 150,000 years to modern-day New York. Head Six and Head Baltar, who are apparently angels working on behalf of God (who doesn't like His name), are roaming the streets and casually commenting on our decadence and (over-)dependence on technology. Moore seems to be setting the series up to continue in perpetuity, as Baltar and Six say that the planet looks just like Kobol and Caprica before their falls, but he's also delivering a horribly simplistic indictment of current tech, whether he means to or not. As Baltar and Six walk away in slow-motion like, I don't know, Neo and Trinity, the camera pans to take in the neon indulgences of Times Square before transitioning to — and this was jaw-dropping — a montage of our own robots dancing and smiling as they become ever more "humanized." I could barely believe what I was seeing. The structural parallel between society's entanglement with technology and the blurred line between human and human-like has always been a fantastic and well-explored theme for "Battlestar Galactica," but to reduce it to a clip of a dancing robot set to Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" was laughable and pitiable and just damn embarrassing. (I'm guessing the song's presence is meant to convey that in every permutation of human society, someone writes a vaguely trippy song whose notes can be converted into three-dimensional coordinates leading to a new home world, which is kind of a disappointing way to explain the song's use in the series.) Everything epic about the show had been rendered flat and unmoving, and everything complex had been pitifully reduced. The only glimmer of hope is The Plan, a forthcoming "Battlestar" TV-movie that will purportedly reveal the Cylons' plan and shed new light on the events of the series. I pray and plead that the movie will do what it can to restore the show and its characters to their former heights; I can't let them go out like this. So say we all.

[For reflections of happier times, or at any rate more interesting ones, I've got a piece about the series' first season, a look at the third season finale, reflections on the current season before it sank into the abyss, and one of my all-time favorite online transcripts.]

Halbey: if leoben and bin linus are in a room playing poker
what happens
Me: zero sum game. constant bluffing assures that no one will ever take the entire pot
Halbey: i'd watch that one-act play
Me: kate and starbuck in a crazy-off. who wins?
Halbey: starbuck
we don't even know if she's a human being
that's how crazy she is
kate can fight to survive or whatever but kara doesn't give a frak
plus she is the only possibly nonhuman alcoholic i've heard of
besides tigh i guess
plus kate is stringing along two already-messed up guys in jack and sawyer. i guess she did get that one guy killed. but starbuck is leading along the son of adama and also the caprican equivalent of lebron james
i think your crazy quota has to be higher to pull that off
jack v lee in a "grim face bc i have the weight of the world on my shoulders" stareoff
Me: hmm
jack, but barely. he's had to be the leader, whereas lee keeps finding ways to be no. 2
Halbey: who felt worse about their infidelity
Me: jack
lee was always starbuck's bitch
Halbey: boy that's the truth. i think jack also regrets his prostitution experiment more too. wasn't bai ling a hooker?

Over at Pajiba, I take my third and final turn in our group look at the best 20 seasons of TV in the past 20 years with another modern classic, the first season of "Battlestar Galactica."

Click here for the piece.

This is a shirt that The Sis sent me as a birthday present. I think it's proof that she understands me, and that she'd make a good vice presidential candidate for the Adama '08 ticket.

The video for the new Old 97's single, "Dance With Me," centers on Tricia Helfer and "Battlestar Galactica." I don't quite know what to make of this; or rather, I can't decide if it's a stunning coincidence or if I should be worried that my tastes and mentality can be so easily deconstructed by the media. I mean, the "BSG" fan picks food out of his beard; that one hits so close it hurts.

Anyway, the video is here. I don't know why Sci Fi hasn't provided an embed code, but the link will take you where you need to go.

UPDATE: Here's the video on YouTube:

[This is a much longer and fundamentally different version of a column running today in the Willamette Week. Also, you should know that this version was written, obviously, shortly after the first episode of the season of "Battlestar Galactica," and by now the wildly disappointing third episode has already aired and we've already moved well past that to seeing Tyrol shave his head and Gaeta get his leg blown apart. But them's the breaks with publishing columns in a weekly paper.]

• "Battlestar Galactica" has always existed in a state of permanent change. A glance at what's transpired over the first three seasons is almost jaw-dropping for the amount of pure plot that the series has packed into about 50 episodes. The series is ostensibly about the remnants of the human race on the run from the cyborgs that annihilated their home worlds and everyone on them, but it's really about the price of humanity and what it means to live with your mistakes, which is why instead of spending an entire season on potentially lengthy arcs — the settlement on New Caprica, or the whole damn civil war when President Roslin and Apollo go galloping off to Kobol and drive a wedge between the military and the government that threatened to derail everything — the series often finds a way to wrap these stories in a handful of episodes while (a) preserving their emotional ramifications and (b) getting everything close enough to normal so that the cycle of change and reconciliation can start all over again.

• The fourth-season premiere, "He That Believeth In Me," in true series fashion, managed to live up to those expectations of growth/challenge even as it managed to broaden the larger story's impact, which is no small thing to do this far into a show, especially since this season will be the last. The episode continued to explore the religious and moral and societal problems facing a people whose numbers are just small enough — 39,000 and change — that they could conceivably implode under the weight of trying to remain upright. Everything on the series has always been about shades of gray, and about doing the best you can in compromising situations, and searching for hope and victory amid despair and chaos.

• For instance, the fact that four of the "final five" Cylon are members of the Galactica crew (except for Tory, who was already pretty expendable and whose confirmation as a Cylon is impactful in that she's the aide to President Roslin but otherwise unimportant because she's a pretty fringe and unlikable character) is amazing on so many levels that it can only be called perfect. Col. Tigh, who's always been the most adamant anti-Cylon voice and who killed his own wife because she was aiding and abetting the robotic alien force of whose ranks he is now a horrified member; Sam Anders, who was stranded on Caprica and led a guerilla squad against the Cylons until Starbuck returned to rescue him; and of course Chief Tyrol, who's gone through this whole thing before when he and Boomer were together only to find out she was a Cylon. The entire concept of betrayal and denial doubles back on itself over and over.

• Which is part of the point: The Cylons were created by man and then rebelled. They have always been mankind's greatest mistake, the decision that led to catastrophe, and in essence the series has been about the survivors running from the physical versions of their own screwed-up lives, of the wrong choices they can never stop making. But the identity of some of the final Cylon models brings that home even more, and it raises a series of killer questions: What does it mean to be human? How much control do I/we have over my/our actions? What is it about someone that makes us love them, and how much of whatever that is is beyond our ability to regulate as far as our feelings are concerned? At what point does the person we love stop being that person we love? Yes, the Cylons wiped out most of humanity; that's gonna make for some bad blood. But what does it mean when we become them, and not in the abstract way where we both resort to similar methods of warfare, but actually physically are our enemies?

• And man, there's no other show on television regularly grappling with tough theology. Baltar's Jesusian appearance and ascendance to cult-like leader were one thing, but the plot involving the sick boy and his anguished mother were deeply religious. When the mother asked Baltar why the one true God didn't want her son to live, she wasn't doing it in that facetious manner of unearned weariness that's commonplace on TV drama; she actually wanted to know why this was happening. She believed; she needed help in her unbelief. And of course Baltar's prayer over the sick boy one night, angrily asking God why a boy who hadn't been alive long enough to sin against his creator was being made to suffer while Baltar himself walked as always free. Baltar's encounter later with Six was another moment of reckoning, as Baltar was held at knife-point and pierced not for the boy's transgressions but for his own lack of moral fortitude. And yet Six — if you act on or at least play along with the assumption that the Cylons can somehow influence Baltar's life and surroundings — granted him a reprieve from death and called his bluff. Now Baltar will have to confront his own feelings about his willingness to be sacrificed, and whether they're real, and what it would mean to act on them.

• Tying religion into the whole human-Cylon issue: Starbuck's apparent resurrection is the first time the characters have to deal with something truly fantastical. Everything else that's happened to them has a vague sense of rationality underpinning it; hell, even the magical jaunt to Earth in the caves of Kobol seems normal compared with this. The Cylons are robots; Vipers run on fuel; water is wet; etc. Everything in the "Battlestar Galactica" universe is usually pretty understandable, but this time, the characters can't avoid the fact that the only thing guiding them for now is their faith. Apollo believes Starbuck is who she says she is, and that she's been to Earth and back; others aren't so sure. And Starbuck is broken by her inability to convince her friends of her humanity, something she's always taken for granted and never thought she'd have to verify. All she can do is tell them who she is; it's up to them to believe her. That's why the script did its best to quietly underscore her human nature: Aside from Adama's (warning) shout of "Starbuck" upon her return, she was almost exclusively referred to as Kara throughout the episode.

• Which is the whole issue. The Cylons are now among the crew of the Galactica, fully aware of what they are and unable to know what will happen to them next. The characters used to ask themselves, Will we survive? But for those coming to grips with their true nature, they face an even tougher question: Do we want to?

Tigh with both eyes, Boomer in chains, Gaius with no dialogue, and Tyrol nowhere to be seen.

Everything's crazy, but also pretty damn good.

Click here for the review.

P.S. I should also tell you that I agree with Beckylooo about Jamie Bamber's hotness. Does it make me less straight to say that? It does not. Bamber is one good-looking man.

Those of you with Facebook accounts can see more photos here.

In short: It was a huge, crazy event, and the crowds were often terrifying. And I want to go again next year.

UPDATE: There's a geek fight going on in the comment thread over at Pajiba. If this thing keeps escalating someone's gonna throw their TI-82, and then the gloves will be off.

"Battlestar Galactica" has always provided some of the best action on TV, not least because even though it's a sci-fi show, the guns still fire bullets and people still die in horrible ways. Similarly, the special effects are carefully constructed to tell the story but never override it; the beauty of the dogfights is partly that they're not just pretty explosions happening for no reason. The effects are remarkably detailed, too, right down to the "No Step" warning on the Viper cockpits. But the remaining humans have managed to stay mostly out of the way of the Cylons since escaping New Caprica, which would have made it understandable and even acceptable if the two-part finale of the show's third season had been a sprawling war arc that stretched from space to planet. But how did the show wrap up the season? Buckle up, kids:

Courtroom drama.

Of course, even when "Battlestar Galactica" isn't dealing with actual battles, it doesn't exactly slow down, merely trades the kinetic excitement of war for the deeper stories that explore the lives and motivations of the main characters. "A Day in the Life" was fantastic at this, reveling in the details of Admiral Adama's ongoing grief over his wife and the cracks spreading slowly between Chief Tyrol and Cally (but if she's willing to stay with him after he broke her jaw during a hallucinatory daydream, they can probably get through squabbles about who has to feed the baby). After setting up the show's mythology as the season's endgame — Tyrol's connection with the temple, Starbuck's connection with the, um, temple — the show made an abrupt left turn by doing two pretty huge things right in a row: Starbuck died, and Baltar got his trial.

The two-part finale, ominously titled "Crossroads" just to make sure we get that some pretty important crap is about to hit the fan, was nothing less than a 90-minute treatise on ethics and morality and how we define those very concepts that form the bedrock of our society. That's not to say it didn't do other things that TV dramas usually do (and do them pretty damn well). The strength of "Battlestar Galactica" is that it can do both: function as a tautly designed, structurally sound, emotionally resonant drama, and also reach for the bigger issues above the treetops.

It's a loose rule — very loose — that TV dramas thrive on change in a stable environment, while TV comedies thrive on stasis in stable environment. For one of many instances, the creators of "Friends" had to keep coming up with ways to keep Ross and Rachel in order to preserve the stasis of the group. (Chandler and Monica were allowed to hook up and stay together because of the corollary that allows secondary relationships to work out while the show's primary relationship continuously fails and succeeds in fits. This is why Tyrol and Cally are married, but Apollo and Starbuck will always have to find their way back to each other.) "Cheers" was 10 years in a bar, "Seinfeld" almost 10 years in a coffee shop, and both series thrived on the inherent unchangeability of their characters: Jerry is pretty much always going to be a germophobic prick, while George will always manage to repel women. The characters in a comedy stay, fundamentally, at the same emotional level throughout the series; Jim and Pam can try all they want, but it ain't gonna happen. However, characters in good dramas progress through an emotional arc over the sourse of the series, so that while their surroundings stay the same, they become different people as a result of their jobs, relationships, etc. The soapy on-again/off-again nature of TV relationships has a lot more gravity on dramas because they characters aren't simply marking time until the finale, when the leads can finally be together; these characters are actually experiencing all this pain, this heartbreak, and as a result they slowly become different people. Off the top of my head, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" probably did as good a job as any show ever did of showing marked change in its characters from pilot to finale: The lessons learned in one season were applied to the next, which raised the stakes, and so on.

However, the trick is pulling those characters through arcs of change without violating the story's natural feel. Perhaps the most egregious example (again, off the top of my head and glancing intermittently at my DVD shelf) is the horrible way that Aaron Sorkin kept Dana and Casey apart on the second season of "Sports Night" by concocting Dana's Dumbass Dating Plan, which forced Casey to feel ashamed for loving Dana and encouraged him to pursue other women, which of course he did. The characters weren't kept apart as a result of any growth or change they went through or any kind of relationship problems; they were just kept apart.

All of which is a long way to say that "Battlestar Galactica" showed once again how smart it is at making its characters grow while also putting them through the relational ringer. Admiral Adama and President Roslin have been growing closer since the evacuation from New Caprica, which has been kind of cute: They're old, and slow, and Adama will look at Roslin and growl, and Roslin will look back at Adama like a playful librarian, and maybe they'll hold hands, and etc. But in order to keep them from getting together (ew) just yet, the show needed a way to keep them apart, and it did so the best way possible: It established their conflicting ideologies over the fate of Gaius Baltar.

The trial itself was masterful in that it forced Lee to test himself like he never has before. Sure, he's rebelled several times in the past, and was barely on speaking terms with his father when the series began. But his acts of independence have always been in line with a belief that the military he serves can and should be the best force of good for the struggling society that's slowly making its way to the promised land of Earth. He went with Roslin to Kobol because he believed her, not because he stopped believing in the cause. But he turned in his wings and quit the service because he didn't like where Admiral Adama was taking things, especially when Adama expressed his belief that Gaius Baltar didn't deserve a fair trial. Lee hated Baltar as much as everyone else, but he wasn't willing to let his distaste for the man color his loyalty to the ideal of a free society. Lee's impassioned speech on the stand was fantastic: He spoke of salvation, and atonement, and the hypocrisy of letting everyone be covered by Roslin's amnesty except for Baltar, who had been made to suffer. He doesn't attempt to excuse Baltar's crimes, nor does his speech quite falter and slip into the murky areas of relativism, i.e., we all made mistakes, so Baltar can make them, too. No, he's arguing the opposite: We've all been forgiven, and Baltar deserves the same pardon.

Lee's speech won over Admiral Adama, demonstrating the old man's ability to grow and change, to mature. And Adama's vote to acquit Baltar in turn pushed Adama and Roslin farther away in a heartbreakingly natural way. While they will probably work back toward a close friendship in the future — hey, they got through the civil war of the show's second season — it won't be easy. "Battlestar Galactica" doesn't cheat like that; reconciliations here are hard-earned.

All of which makes it so much harded to accept that, for now, the show is gone for a while. Instead of beginning its fourth season this fall, the series isn't returning until January 2008, which is just an ungodly amount of downtime for one of the best dramas on TV. The series deals with politics and religion and what it means to live in a free society and what kind of laws we give ourselves, and it does it better than anybody else in the game. The finale relied on "All Along the Watchtower" as a plot device and as the soundtrack to the impending Cylon attack that filled the episode's final seconds, and the use of the song was an effective way to emotionally tie the fictional world to ours. It's not exactly a new trick — Stephen King also used "Hey Jude" to eerie effect in The Gunslinger — but it still managed to lend the sequence a weight, a sense of foreboding, that drove home the revelation of the identities of four of the remaining Cylon models (about which I'm sure I will write at length over this long, hot, empty summer). It's enough to make me want to dive back into the show on DVD. I'm really going to miss it.

me: if i had to shoot you in the gut and blow your blood across the wall so you could die and download into a new you just to save our baby...
me: i would do it
RMS: thank you
RMS: If you crashed over a hill 2 clicks away, I'd send sarah out for you
me: thank you
me: if you were stuck on the surface, i would act like i would nuke you to save the world, but i would be bluffing. i would let you live
RMS: thx
RMS: if you defied the authority of the group, I would tranfer your sentience to cold storage
me: i appreciate that
me: if you kept killing yourself to see the face of God, i would encourage you to follow your dreams
RMS: thanks
RMS: if you tortured me, I would imagine I was having sex at the time
me: good
me: if you got shot by a robot, i would totally kill her in cold-blooded vengeance
RMS: thanks
RMS: if I was really mad at you, i would have an intense boxing match then hug it out
me: aw, thanks
me: if your wife wanted to sleep with me, i would wait until she divorced you first
RMS: thx
RMS: If you betrayed the resistance, I would poison you
me: you'd better
me: if your wife was wounded a couple miles away, i would force you to stay with me at gunpoint
RMS: good
RMS: if you lost your eye and were embittering the crew, I would tell you to shoot me or get the hell out
me: if sarah was being held captive, i would go with you and help kill the guys who were about to hurt her
RMS: thx
RMS: if we got stranded with the rest of a sports team, I would lead us in the resistance
me: thanks
me: if you sided with the enemy during the occupation, i would consider throwing you out the airlock once we escaped
RMS: thanks
RMS: I you were under my command, I would speak in low tones and not look at you until things were bad and I started to growl
me: thanks
me: if i were captured and asked about you, i would let them pull out my eye, since i would never give you up
RMS: thank you
RMS: if they killed you in a raid on the temple, I would blow myself up at graduation
me: if you were shot in an away mission on the surface, i would lie to you and say the ship was here, so that you would be happy when you died
RMS: thank you
RMS: if you were captured and held prisoner by the cylons for years, I would admit that I lied to you
RMS: about being shot down by me
me: thanks, man
me: if you were a mean commander of a rival ship, i would arrange your assassination

My sister told Entertainment Weekly about how "Battlestar Galactica" was unfairly snubbed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association when it comes to Golden Globe nominations. She even threw in a dig at "Heroes."

I don't know what to say. I'm just proud, is all.

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[As always, discussions of TV shows currently airing are likely to contain, you know, spoilers. If you're not quite smart enough to figure that out, this is your warning. If this warning doesn't work, please have your home health care provider turn off your computer and take you out for ice cream.]

I've been writing about the wonder that is "Battlestar Galactica" for a while now, and this season I've become more convinced than ever that it's one of the greatest shows on TV. And it's not just the show's willingness to explore the dark side of humanity that keeps me riveted, but how the stories manage to marry that darkness with a sense of honor, and hope, and unrelenting struggle against impossible odds.

In only the first 11 episodes of its third season, "Battlestar Galactica" has gone through more upheaval and turmoil than other shows would dare pack into an entire year. The seires could have spent the entire season focused on the New Caprica settlement established at the end of Season 2, which was accomplished with a one-year jump forward in the show's chronology. But no; after four episodes, the settlers had been rescued from the Cylon invasion, Baltar had cast his lot with the Cylons, the men all changed their facial hair and then changed it back, and Tigh lost an eye before assassinating his own wife for betraying the cause.

So, things have been eventful.

Yet I find myself moved again to praise the show, despite the fact that my repeated mentions of the show probably bore some people¹, because it continues to bravely explore such relevant issues as the role of military in the government and the place of religion in public society, and it does it with flair and grace and downright beautiful storytelling. After the fleet was restored and had fled New Caprica, the show dealt with the treacherous nature of insurgency fighters and vigilante justice by having a cabal of crew members dispense private retribution for war crimes. And then there was Starbuck and Tigh's personal quest to sow discord among the ranks just for the hell of it. And who could forget Apollo's argument in favor of genocide?

But it was the ninth episode, "Unfinished Business," that again raised the series' bar for pure sweep. Tying together most of the major characters' stories in an episode that relied purely on backstory and relational history to drive the plot, it ostensibly revolved around a boxing match for the officers. The structure of the episode is moving, as repeated images and scenes become expanded until the full plot is revealed. The episode takes place during the year of action the viewer never saw, between the discovery of New Caprica and the later retreat from the planet. It built on the festering Apollo-Starbuck relationship and showed in greater detail just why he hated her so much, and letting them beat each other up in the ring was a sadness only matched by Apollo's look of heartbreak when he discovered Starbuck had literally abandoned him at dawn.

And while "Unfinished Business" featured the show at the peak of its character-driven melodramatic power, the latest episode, "The Eye of Jupiter," was another great marriage of the show's tangled relationships with its increasingly complex mythology. Having the humans and Cylons clash over the latest signpost on the way to Earth is inevitable, but the series keeps the conflict fresh by making it a political standoff and an observation of the power of religion. It's infinitely more unsettling when, instead of simply engaging in a firefight with the enemy or running away, the Galactica hosts Cylon representatives for an uneasy discussion of a possible temporary truce. Seeing the opposing sides come to an impasse over the newly discovered holy temple has an odd grounding effect on the conflict, and instead of casting one group as inherently good while the other is irredeemably evil, the humans and Cylons are simply portrayed as having two different approaches to survival. It's a nice move to make the "bad guys" so fascinating and relatable, and it's one of the many things that helps the show transcend its narrow genre and become a beautiful, compelling drama.

^{1. Deal.}

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[Permanent disclosure: Any and all TV shows or films discussed here will inevitably contain minor spoilers. Deal.]

I think it was the moment when Leoben the Cylon revealed to Starbuck that her excised ovary had been salvaged and used to create a human/cyborg daughter that I began to understand that "Battlestar Galactica" is one dark, sad show. The sci-fi drama's third season kicked off in high gear on Friday, picking up after last season's cliffhanger pretty much imploded the show's universe by jumping forward a year to show the struggle of the human settlers on New Caprica and the return of the Cylons, who invaded the fledgling colony and established their own rules. The show is simply amazing.

It's nothing new for a series to walk the line between light and dark; ever since "The Sopranos" bowed in 1999, darkness has been in vogue, especially on cable, with "Deadwood," "The Wire," "Rescue Me," "Nip/Tuck," and "The Shield" going all-out to show the inner horrors of the human psyche as their characters fell to impossible depths of loneliness and depravity. But "Battlestar Galactica" is different from most of those shows because it features likable, relatable characters, whereas most of the other series are just crazy for the sake of being crazy.

Take "Nip/Tuck." It's a visually stimulating show, but absolutely pointless. It does dark better than most — Sean's recent drug-fueled hallucination of his personal demon banging his personal angel was attention-getting, to say the least — but the darkness isn't tempered by any kind of genuine emotion. It's not that I want the show to be lighter; I want it to make me care about the characters who are dealing with such hard, dark times. And I don't. Sean is a whiny punk, his wife is a bitter wreck, and Christian is a soulless husk of a man who sees the futility of his ways and doesn't so much refuse to atone as much as he just lets thoughts of atonement drift away like a bad hangover. Let them suffer.

Conversely, the rough road that the denizens of the "Battlestar" universe walk is heartbreaking precisely because the writers, producers, and actors put so much energy into making me care for the characters. The stunning casualness with with Col. Tigh loses an eye serves to underscore the colonists' dire straits, reinforce the image of the Cylons' murderous ways, and instill sympathy for Tigh all at once. The show isn't in a rush to show how dark and crazy it can be, as in the story line on last season's "Rescue Me" when it seemed like everybody was raping everybody just for the hell of it. And "Battlestar" stands in dark contrast to Showtime's new series "Dexter," which is so busy trying to look cool you forget that it doesn't matter who lives or dies; you just don't care.

So many shows are wallowing in pointless vice without having it smack up against virtue, which is what creates genuine conflict and memorable relationships for a series' characters. The physical violation of Starbuck is that much more horrifying because we've already come to identify with her and relate to her, to sympathize with her struggle to balance the coldness that keeps her alive and the love (lately for Anders) that keeps her going. Tigh isn't some cartoon villain, but a man who wants to do right and has a blind spot a mile wide for Ellen, his duplicitous wife, and the series even tempers her acts of betrayal with emotion: She does what she does to save her husband from the Cylons. The plots develop from the spark between people's basest interests and purest intentions, making the darkness something we recognize as our own.

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I know it's only been a week since I talked about "Battlestar Galactica," but in that time I watched Season 2.0, the DVD set of the first half of the show's second season (the rest of it won't be out on DVD until the fall, which is an unholy and criminal thing for Universal to do, but whatever). And I'm stunned at how good it is.

Some genre background: I admit to liking "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when I was a boy, and looking back, it makes perfect sense. That show was made for boys: Effects-driven, flat characters, and a stunning lack of arc, drama, tension, direction, themes, and pretty much everything good you can ask from a TV show. It was like an interstellar version of a police procedural in its relentless sameness: Watching the pilot episode and watching one from four years later is almost the same experience. It's a shame that the show is one of the first things that springs to mind when people think of sci-fi, because in a way, it's one of the poorest examples of the genre. It's like a war film that focuses on explosions and bad characters instead of the nuanced lives of the troops. But I loved that stuff as a kid: The whiz-bang action, the fact that none of the main characters was ever for one moment in any kind of real peril, the fact that it was not only unnecessary but impossible to imagine the life experiences or emotions of the characters to have any impact on their present actions. The show was undone by its timidity in approaching its premise: It meekly went where no one really cared to go.

But when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man (or at least a much older male), I put childish ways behind me.

"Battlestar Galactica" (again, any and all references are to the new version unless otherwise noted; as far as I'm concerned, the original show never happened) is a gut-wrenching, adult drama with a political, spiritual, and emotional resonance too rarely seen on TV. The show packed more drama, tension, and heartbreak into the first 10 episodes of its second season than a lot of other shows do all year, or ever. A plot line that sends the fleet spiraling into possible civil war could have rightly taken up an entire season, but this show moves faster than that, and by the season's midpoint, the ragtag fleet of humans who survived the massive alien attack that began the series has been restored, only to face greater challenges.

The second season of "Battlestar Galatica" was, impossibly, even better than the first. There's a track record of truly great second seasons, and this one's up there. It heightens the drama, pushes the characters to new heights and depths, and amps up the pain big time. I'll admit, I even got a little choked up a few times. It's one of the best shows on TV right now, hands down. More than once, I thought, "Now this is what 'Lost' should be like." After all, "Lost" is a genre show, too, just heavier on mystery and woefully lighter on character. But whereas the entire point of "Lost" is to watch more "Lost" (the show is like "Twin Peaks" in that way), "Battlestar Galactica" is rewarding for its growth, change, and progress.

Granted, the show's dialogue is nothing stellar. It lacks the punch or inherent wit that are hallmarks of other great modern showrunners. But neither is the dialogue useless exposition focused on worthless technical jargon that sacrifices character for the sake of gee-whiz technology. It always serves to enhance and grow the characters. In one of the best signs of a good TV drama, the characters show marked change over time. People aren't the same as the were in the pilot episode, and that's a good thing.

For a futuristic show, it's also amazingly grounded in reality. The phones on the ship are wall-mounted and rely and cords; high-tech radar exists, but none of the impossible "on-screen" tech on "Next Generation"; the ships have a gritty, lived-in feel, pioneered by Ridley Scott almost 30 years ago and beautifully continued to this day; but best of all, nothing comes too easy. That's the thing that bugs me most about "Next Generation." Shot? Sick? Hungry? No need to worry, the ridiculously outfitted Enterprise, complete with sets borrowed from a mid-'90s Chevy Suburban, is here to help. Food appeared out of nowhere, diseases and wounds were healed almost instantly by the bored doctor, and those freaks has so much free time that they used a phenomenal amount of computing power to play Robin Hood with holograms. That show presented a utopian, bizarrely idealized version of the future, during which mankind has apparently decided to get together and end all war and economic dispute in the interest of exploring space in matching jumpsuits. But in the much more engaging world of "Battlestar Galactica," guns still use bullets, and people still die. The second season begins with a major character suffering a gunshot at close range, and it's a life-threatening wound. The stakes are legimate here.

The series runs deep with questions of justice, law, ethics, morality, and what it means to be human. There are fewer than 50,000 people left in the universe, and the show depicts the small society struggling to hold firm to the laws that have guided them for years, laws that have even greater meaning now that there are so few left to uphold them. After all, who's to say what's a crime? What does it mean to live in a just society? The characters in "Battlestar Galactica" are never more than a few steps from slipping over the edge. At one point, military officers rape and torture an enemy agent, citing its inhumanity as grounds for the treatment. The Cylon is an enemy, true, and is one of the refined models of robots originally created by humans before the Cylons rebelled and ignited the war. (In another brilliant update from the first show, having the Cylons be man's creation tightens the dramatic structure immensely, moving the antagonists from merely just another group of aliens to physical representations of our own sins visited upon us.) But their behavior is shocking, not in spite of the nature of the enemy, but because of it: Presented with an opportunity to display their humanity, the humans reverted to animals.

One of the sharpest bits of dialogue comes in a throwaway exchange between two Galactica officers who intervened and stopped what was about to be the rape of another prisoner. One of the men says, "I thought the Cylons were the enemy." His friend replies, "Yeah, well, now it's us." The show is uncompromising in its intent to mine the painful truths of life, and that places it far beyond most other shows on TV.

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A few weeks ago, the trades shipped issues with hard black covers bearing critical blurbs praising an unnamed TV show. The gist:

"One of the best shows on TV. … [T]he toughest smartest show on television …" — Rolling Stone

"… one of the best shows on television …" — The New York Times

"… much much better than you can possiby imagine …" — Salon.com

"… one of the most original and provocative programs on television …" — Newsday

And so on in the same vein. The hard covers contained a perforated circle in the middle, behind which was an Emmy consideration DVD. I was curious as to which show could draw such praise from so many critics and have its title go unmentioned anywhere in the ad. I punched open the cardboard and pulled out the contents, which turned out to be a disc with three complete "Battlestar Galactica" episodes and a few selected scenes.

My knee-jerk response was one of mild disappointment, which was exactly what the nameless ad had been so desperately trying to avoid. The marketing department behind "Battlestar Galatica" surely knows this: You can't just go spring a sci-fi show on somebody, especially if you're trolling for mainstream awards. No, you have to slip it in the back door, make people read the critical acclaim before opening the box. And that's a shame.

It's a shame for many reasons, because after viewing the first season of "Battlestar Galactica," I can tell you honestly that it's an amazing show, full of drama and pain and heartbreak and sex and violence and betrayal and death and death and death and everything you could want in a drama. And it happens to be set in outer space. This reborn version of the 1978 series has nothing in common with the original except its name. I saw a few episodes of the original when I was younger, and even back then I knew it was campy, cheesy, and unbelievably stupid. (Now that I'm older, I can also see how it was really, really gay: Men with feathered hair who wear capes and pilot phallic spaceships into long metal tubes all day. I mean, come on.) But this reimagining of the show is infinitely superior to the first, so much so that it's impossible to even compare the two. The first doesn't even exist, as far as I'm concerned. Think of the creative leap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and multiply it by something like 19 and you'll begin to understand how much better the new "Battlestar Galactica" is compared with the old one.

But I was reluctant to check out the show at first. For starters, it's an original production from Sci Fi Channel, and their raison d'être seems to be creating and airing some truly godawful programming. Their made-for-TV movies are a joke in everything from effects to casting to story, and their original shows tend to err on the side of alienating anyone who wants a sharp drama in favor of people who prefer cold facts and random scientific-sounding jargon. I therefore figured that "Battlestar Galactica" would surely fall into the latter camp. I've found myself writing off a lot of sci-fi sight unseen — I'm almost reluctant to do all this talking about sci-fi, period — but that's a dangerous habit to have.

Every genre has its successes and its failures, and to wall yourself off from a certain type of film because of prejudice toward the genre just doesn't make sense. A lot of dramas suck. A lot of action movies suck. A lot of romantic comedies suck. I'll save us all a lot of time: A lot of movies just plain suck. But it would be foolish to avoid all films because some of them were of low quality. No film is automatically good or bad by virtue of its genre. That's like saying "All Westerns suck" or "All World War II films are great," and those are the kind of broad, sweeping statements best left to wayward undergrads, and I think we're all past that.

So I gave "Battlestar Galactica" a chance, and discovered a truly great show. It's a tightly woven, compelling drama about what it means to live in a free society and the importance of justice in the presence of chaos; the sci-fi setting is the backdrop, not the focus. It's shot in a hand-held, documentary style, and the sets have a wonderful lived-in feel, as if the characters actually inhabit that fictional universe, as opposed to the clinically sterile feel of better known but vastly inferior shows. It's already been proven that an honest, character-driven drama set in space can work. "Battlestar Galactica" is another entry in that field, and it would be unfortunate if people avoided it just because of its genre.

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