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Early in the wee hours of Sunday morning, as I mulled over the events of last night’s Battlestar Galactica, I suddenly hit upon an idea for another weekly feature. After all, No One Reads Fridays had gone so well — by which I mean it required little effort on my part and was a lot of fun to write — so why not create a Monday TV Roundup, wherein I talked about the few shows I watched the previous week? Dear God! So beautiful!

Of course, the sheer brilliance of this idea will be immediately evident to savvy readers. Rome just aired its series finale, and BSG won’t be back until 2008. See, this is why you should never try to do things. It’s a mistake. And yet, I’m going to go ahead with this anyway. Take that, universe! I’ll readily admit that I have no idea what I’ll be writing about next Monday, if indeed I’m writing about anything at all. But, whatever it is, I can almost certainly assure you it won’t be Robin of Sherwood. (Okay, it probably will.)

Anyway, on to the Battlestar Galactica season finale. Spoilers follow.

Let’s start out with a big positive. The one truly standout moment in this week’s show was Apollo’s speech, which made me want to stand up and cheer. In one shining moment, Apollo not only revealed the reason for his seemingly unwarranted character changes, but addressed head-on practically every grievance I’ve had with the third season — and, more importantly, it actually had an effect! I’ll admit it, for a few short minutes, I wanted to hug the show again, in a way I haven’t wanted to do since the opening of season two. More importantly, this felt like a welcome return to form on a few key storytelling points: Apollo is back in the saddle, Rosyln and Adama may well find themselves at odds again, and Baltar is set adrift, probably worse off now than he’s ever been. I found all these things enormously pleasing, and even found it in my heart to like Oakley Space Lawyer, just a little.

Then there are the bits that I’m not so thrilled about. First of all, I found “killing” Starbuck a few episodes ago to be exceedingly lame — the only thing I could imagine being lamer still would be to bring her back two episodes later, which is precisely what they did. As for the how and why of her coming back, I’m going to reluctantly admit that I barely care at this point; I find the twists and turns they’ve inflicted on Starbuck more annoying than interesting. Troubled, angry, down-to-earth Starbuck is now both a Cylon (presumably) and some sort of religious visionary? I don’t object to these things by themselves, they just feel so tacked on to me. The ongoing mystery of Starbuck is obviously intended to keep us watching by drawing out the mystery for as long as possible, but I’m already tired of it. We already have one pilot on the Galactica who realized she became a Cylon — Boomer. We already have not one, not two, but three people on board Galactica having religious visions, not to mention the other assorted expository hallucinations that are happening on the side. Is another Cylon who sees crazy shit really what the narrative’s been crying out for?

This, of course, brings us to my penultimate point, which is the presumed identity of the Final Five, namely Tigh, Tyrol, Anders, and… That One Chick. Watching this presented me (I say me because I don’t want to speak for a larger audience) with two unpleasant predictions about season four: either all these characters really are Cylons, which means a lot more “holy shit I’m a Cylon” episodes that we’ve already pretty much seen, or they’re actually not Cylons and the fourth season is going to be all about questioning identity and a lot of introspective crap that we’ve already pretty much seen.

Now, if I seem bitter and uncharitable about what could be a very thoughtful, innovative approach to a science-fiction show, it’s mostly because, once again, the means of telling this kind of story are already in place. Galactica already has several Cylons on board, sitting around waiting to come to terms with themselves or whatever — piling on four more is not what the show needs, dramatically. Maybe the writers of BSG will surprise me, but, much like the “reset button” of the season two finale, this seems like a ploy to cover ground that’s already been sufficiently covered. Plus, where’s my fucking space battles? Is it really going to be another season of everybody getting in touch with their feelings about everything, for fuck’s sake?

Finally, I do want to end my hyper-critical screed on a positive note. The final sequence, despite the premature reappearance of Starbuck, did have a “holy shit, we found the story!” feel to it, which was a welcome relief after the dramatic floundering of this entire season. While I wasn’t blown away by this season finale, it did have a couple spectacular moments, and was good enough to leave me annoyed at the long wait we’ll be having for season four. So I haven’t abandoned Galactica just yet — but neither will I be waiting breathlessly for next year to arrive.

I was going to sound off at length on Rome at the end of this entry, but I ranted a bit more about Galactica than I intended, and I think I’ll save it for next week instead.