So long, Starbuck! BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ends tonight! by COOP

Posted on March 20th, 2009

I’ve been silent about Battlestar on this blog. I’m not the biggest TV buff, but when a show strikes my fancy (Heroes, Dexter, Shasta McNasty…) I stick with it until the end.

I’m an unapologetic fan of the original 1978 series. I saw the pilot episode at a movie theater and watched the series religiously every Sunday evening.

Love those Egyptian-inspired disco suits!

When the new miniseries premiered in 2003, I was not impressed. “If they were ancient decedents of the Egyptians, the Toltecs or the Mayans… why they hell are they wearing three piece suits???” I thought. I had problems with the lazy costume designs, the generic actors and why the frak did they make Starbuck and Boomer females? About a week after the minisereies premiered I ran into Katie Sackhoff (she was still relatively unknown) at a watering hole next to Universal Studios and didn’t bother to introduce myself. She was a hottie alright but I kept thinking to myself… “A female Starbuck? She’s just a flash in the pan!” How wrong and foolish I was.

A good while later when they finally got around releasing the new series, the first episode where the fleet has to jump every 33 minutes (because that’s how long it takes the cylons to find them) blew my mind and I’ve been hooked ever since.

While the final season has me glued to the screen, I can’t help but feel unhappy about it. I’ve been frustrated since they found Earth, devastated by nuclear war and uninhabitable. Since then, the series has had absolutely NO sense of direction and no goals whatsoever. It’s been a weak sendoff with the action jettisoned for heavy soap opera elements, all the while trying to hastily wrap up all the loose ends in a display of poor pacing. All that and still it’s the best thing on television. I can only pray the two our finale makes up for the lack of action and urgency so prevalent in the first two seasons.

The venerable Battlestar will most certainly meet destruction since they’ve been telegraphing that fact for the last four or five episodes (makes you think they sacrificed Battlestar Pegasus a bit too quickly, eh?). A massive suicide mission to rescue one little girl. I’m eager to see how it plays out.

This is the end for the Galactica but not the end for this franchise. There are still rumors of a couple of TV movies featuring the Galactica during its glorious heydays getting a greenlight sometime in the near future. If you can’t wait for that, the prequel series “Caprica” will premiere this Fall and will remain planet side to explore why the humans created the cylons in the first place. *YAWN* Sounds like a ho-hum follow up to the genocidal desperation of the first series. Let’s hope they dump that premise to focus entirely on Cylon War I with a young “Husker” Adama kicking toaster tail.

Until it gets remade again in another 25 years, so long Galactica!

The 2 hour finale promo!…