bsg s3

So I finished season 3 of Battlestar Galatica over the weekend and have now started on the final season.

Season 3 was good, although I think I preferred season 2 if I'm honest.

The main problem, I think, was that season 3 took a bit of an odd path with the Cylons. The basic set-up of BSG is that the Cylons are trying to kill the humans.

But, in S3, they sort of decide not to kill the humans. Ish. Instead, they sort of try to live n harmony with us. Only they make an appalling hash of the job. And for sentient machines it was a surprisingly big hash.

Don't get me wrong - I understood it, it just seemed like too much of a switch; too much of a back-peddle. Also, the main problem, was that after that things became unclear.

Once the humans had escaped, where the Cylons now back to killing the humans? Or... what? They didn't seem to state their new course of action, other than apparently deciding to have the same end-goal as the humans... for no apparent reason.

I dunno, it became a bit confusing and illogical if I'm honest. And if you make the main threat illogical and confusing, it sort of eases up the pressure on the good guys.

The other slight niggle I had was that there are now so many balls in the air that some of the plot-lines got short-shrift.

So, for example, a big chunk of the first half focused on Baltar, but then in the second half he virtually disappeared, apart from the very end, when suddenly it was all about him again.

This is sort of fine and the norm for episodic television, except that he was totally forgotten. There weren't even many little asides about "Oh, what are we going to do about him?".

But there is a slight problem that's a bit worse than that, and if I'm honest it's been throughout the show. It's that characters are a bit inconsistent week-on-week.

I can best explain this with Lee Adama (Apollo). So one week he's all fine and dandy - a super pilot killing Cylons.

Then, the next week we get an episode depicting him as emotional wreck, where he's trying to replace a woman he loved but hurt and lost with a prostitute.

Okay, fine - the first episode is perhaps showing his veneer of normality. Except that the second episode ends a bit badly and he should at least be a bit cut up and distracted the next time we see him.

But he's not - he's back to being a hero-type fighter-jock.

Until the fourth episode, when suddenly he's behaving like an insensitive love-rat type cad and a bounder.

Then he's back to hero-type fighter-jock.

It gets a little annoying. I mean it's not quite as bad as that makes it sound, but it is there.

I mean, another example is Dee and Billy. Initially, they seem to be a young couple in love, but then for some reason that's never really explained, Dee becomes interested in Apollo and basically jumps his bones. It would have been fine if they'd layered in that secretly she loved Apollo, but they didn't - it's more like a sudden change in her personality.

But as niggles go these are relatively minor things. I'm guessing if I'd been watching it on a weekly basis they also wouldn't have been so obvious.

Also, I think more time elapses between episodes than you would normally assume. I've been assuming episodes happen properly sequentially - like the next day, but I think actually it's more like a chunk of eps happen sequentially, then there's more of a gap, then another chunk.