The Last Starfighter Meets Hogan’s Heroes

I’m still trying to decide about last night’s season finale of Battlestar Galactica. If you watch the show, and haven’t seen the season 2 finale yet, just skip this post until you have seen it, because I’m letting the spoilers out.

I guess my biggest concern is that the writers seem prepared to abandon the premise. That’s not a good recipie for keeping the viewers happy. The story is about a search for safety and a new home, after suffering a horrifying disaster. A story about what it’s like for the survivors to live under the rule of their Cylon captors will be too much like Deep Space Nine meets Life is Beautiful. Thank you, I’ll pass.

I’m also concerned with the huge time-jump at the end of the episode. There was a tremendous amount of character development and activity that we missed in between the resolution of the election conflict and the very next scene, which began with the fade-in logo “One Year Later.” When Six Feet Under jumped ahead fifteen months without letting the viewers in on what had happened, I found the discontinuity so great that I lost some interest in the series — and combining that with the writers putting new twists on the quirky characters to normalize them made it even harder to sustain my interest.

A lot of people don’t like the politics in a series show that deals with issues of government and military power. I love it, especially when the gray areas of morality come in to play. I groove on moral ambiguity, and was really liking the ambiguous nature of the characters’ actions in the first hour of the finale. But there’s no more shades of gray left, or at least so it seems.

There is room for a lot more combat and action sequences, and that’s a good thing. But these don’t mean much without a plot arc to adorn. Surely the writers have something in mind for their overall five-season plot arc, or they wouldn’t have done what they did. I hope it’s worthwhile.