Revelations

I found this week's mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica to be a satisfying mix of the expected and the unexpected.

On the one hand, I had been starting to suspect that the fleet would actually find Earth some time before the actual series finale. The fact that the Final Five have been there before implies a story that needs to be fleshed out there, and I expected that couldn't be saved until the season finale. But did I expect the show would take them to Earth this early in the final season? No way.

Since day one, I've expected that Earth wouldn't be all it was cracked up to be when they final did get there. In exactly what way, I wasn't sure. My "guesses," if pressed to make them, might have ranged from (vaguely serious) Earth a few thousand years B.C. where our characters and their religions could have become the basis for actual historic civilizations, to (not-at-all-serious) finding the crew of the 1978 version of the TV show living together in a high-rise apartment with the Imperious Leader as their butler.

Utter desolation, I was not expecting. And on the one hand, I find that very cool -- it sure made for a hell of a punchy ending to this episode. On the other hand, I'm not sure where this leaves the story to go from here. The crew gets to Earth and finds nothing. Are we to feel particularly invested in what tragedy befell Earth? I wouldn't think so -- the show is about the characters we've watched for four seasons, not about what happened in the past of a planet we've never been to (even if it is ours, the viewers'). How is the show going to find a way to tell ten more hours of interesting stories in a devestated wasteland? I suppose there is a plan.

More than just the punchy ending, though, this episode delivered a lot of great character moments. The title "Revelations" says it all, as the Four were revealed as Cylons to everyone. The impact of this on Admiral Adama (where Tigh was concerned) was some of the most powerful stuff the show has ever presented. And though there wasn't really time yet to explore what this means for Anders and Starbuck, I'm sure we'll see that in episodes to come.

In fact, "not enough time" is really my only complaint about the episode. It felt like a two-hour episode wedged into the standard 42 minutes. The standoff between D'Anna and Our Heroes, with Lee having to act as President in his first real crisis, was actually very compelling material, and could have filled out a whole episode. Instead, it was squeezed into half that space to make room for the revelation of the Four. And all that was awesome too -- just again, shoehorned into too short a space of time. Then, the rather momentous event of having the fleet and the Cylons truly, actually agreeing to work together, without either really planning to screw the other, was completely bowled over in the rush to get to the arrival at Earth.

In short, it's sad that after half of this season's episodes have been (arguably) not all that great, all this spectacular material was squandered at once. It was an embarassment of riches, really. But nice in that it made for, in my opinion, the best episode of the show since season two's Pegasus.

But now we're stuck in limbo. The SciFi Channel hasn't officially announced the return date for the final episodes of the series, but all the expectation seems to be it won't be until January 2009 at the earliest. It's pretty ridiculous, I think, to go off the air for over a year between seasons three and four, only to come back for 10 episodes and then vanish again for another seven months or more. Certainly, it's a major stretch to call all of this a single season -- it's more like we're get a ten-episode season four and a forthcoming season five.

But I guess there's nothing for it but to just sit and wait. And while we're doing that, we can all contemplate D'Anna's almost off-handed comment that only four of the Final Five were among the fleet. Unless there's some peculiar way to parse that statement, it seems to say that the last remaining Cylon isn't actually going to be a major character on the show. Perhaps it could be some past character who hasn't been with the fleet for a while -- someone who died or was abandoned, perhaps? Or maybe it'll just be some bizarre bit of stunt casting, like maybe in the teaser of the next new episode, Dirk Benedict will walk up to the group of them across the scarred Earth landscape and say "hi, I'm the twelfth Cylon."

Ponder that for seven months, folks.