Sigh. The Emperor has no clothes, and I just can’t bring myself to go along with the crowd.

I didn’t get it.

I watched all four seasons bang-bang-bang-bang over a period of a couple of months, paid pretty close attention, and now that it’s over, I don’t get it.

That in and of itself is not such a big deal. I might have missed something, I might have misunderstood. The problem is, I don’t care.

By last week I was so close to the end  I had to push on through, but I spent more time wanting the series to get there than I did being interested in what was going on. In fact, in season 4, the only thing I really looked forward to was the animations of the producers at the very end. I would like to have a disc of those, please.

I was no fan of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica, with Lorne Greene and Dirk Benedict, which might very well have been inspired by the success of Star Wars, but which still had the touch of the craptastic that had always ruined science fiction on TV. Hell is endless reruns of Land of the Giants and Lost in Space, peppered with kinescopes of Liberace.

I never watched much TV at the best of times, but I developed a distaste for cheese and camp early on. Even as a kid, I hated the cheap sci-fi shows like Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and the German-produced Flash Gordon, but at least they were played more or less straight. I loved the Adventures of Superman with George Reeves, but didn’t realize that Great Ceasar’s Ghost and Sylvester J. Superman were from later seasons; they were just episodes to be tolerated until the two part Superman and the Mole-Men aired again. I did wonder why The Lone Ranger never had to stoop to “humorous” episodes. But then, westerns were not science-fiction.

But we’re talking about BSG. Culture gadfly Eric Lee recommended it highly, and for the first two seasons, I was pretty excited. I got pretty bored with the religious stuff, not because I have anything against religion but because it just didn’t ring true, like a non-smoker  trying to puff convincingly on a coffin nail. You can spot them every time.

Although I do appreciate that convincing alien names are tough to come up with, and while I am glad the writers didn’t descend into things like Zithmot or Fir-tan or other nonsense words, using names of actual Greek gods was distracting. No matter how they explained it away at the end, it was pretty unbelievable that the names descended without variation from an ancient original. Myth-making takes a long time (or a lot  of luck) and the process is not kind. The wrap-up of the whole religious angle is where the show, for me, fell apart.

It didn’t help that  right smack-bang from the start I was totally annoyed by Gaius Baltar (James Callis) and Caprica (Trisha Helfer.) Whether it was written, directed or just acted the way it was, Baltar danced dangerously close to territory claimed long ago by Dr. Zachary Smith.  He was such a wishy-washy character, used by the writers for whatever was convenient at the moment, that I never took to him, even ashe left most of the comedy behind near the end. But I never bought his  conversion or his redemption.  Wikus, in District 9, was a little thicker version of the same character, and he pulled it off quite well, so it can be done.

The Caprica angel character -which is one of the major things that I still don’t understand– was annoying. Ms. Helfer is lovely to look at, but her wispy Marilyn Monroe impersonation didn’t do much for me. I was pleasantly surprsed to find, as the series progressed, that she is actually quite a good actress and did a great job of varying all the different permutations of model 6. But the angel, no thanks.

The rest of the cast, though was largely excellent. James Edward Olmos seemed to be battling a little weight problem, but he was great as Adama and anchored the show. (I remember seeing him live  onstage in Zoot Suit in Los Angeles, as El Pachuco (sp?). That was the role that launched his career, and he’s better now than ever.)

Mary McDonnel is a little mannered for my taste, but still fresh and believable up until her visions started. Katee Sackhoff , Jamie Bamber, Gracie Park and  Allesandro Julianin all did great work but my favorite two characters were Chief Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) and  Tahmoh Pinkett (Helo.) Michael Hogan walked along a precarious edge as Col. Tigh, a little too pirate-y at times, especially after he started wearing the eye-patch. Kate Vernon was suitably obnoxious as his wife, though over the top when she was at her bitchy heights. Later in the series, without wanting to  spoil anything, she was quite good. But someone please tell me what that last bitch-attack on tigh was all about. IU get it that she was ‘just as human’ as the rest of us, but I don’t buy the idea that she could also be a potential candidate for the Jerry Springer Show. That’s parody.

Production values were great, loved the ship design, was intrigued by the low tech of the high tech: they can jump though space,but still use phones; book publishing, rather than being replaced by the Cylon Kindle had only advanced to the point of lopping the corners off books and cards, as if to idealize one of those buttery crackers that used to come with your dinner salad.

The Cylon war was exciting and often spectacular. I even liked the first half of Season 3, where a new colony under the rule of the Cylons was not working out so well. The religious stuff seemed to settle down for awhile.

Now I figure the writers had to have had some plan in mind. They knew where in general they planned to tale the show. What makes TV so tough is that you don’t know how long your series is going to be on the air. You can’t use up all your material right up front, but you can’t delay it to the point that you end up not completing the arc.

But having a plan doesn’t mean it’s automatically a good plan. It doesn’t even mean that you’ve thought it all through. “We’ll meet at Chez Siam at 9 p.m. Tuesday” doesn’t mean you googled a map and know exactly where it is.

Season 4 and the whole Final Five arc felt like writers flailing about in a too deep swimming pool, the lights being off and them not being able to see the pool edges.

From the point where Galactica drops into the ph in season 3, the series spiraled downwards at an near-light speed. More gobbledygook about God’s plan, about destiny, about “the child.” You can only be so vague before you have to start paying the mysteries off, and BSG never gets to that point.

The choice of who the final five actually were left me cold. It seemed so random. I confess, I was expecting to say “Ah, that makes sense, I just didn’t see it coming.”  As it was, I think they could have picked any five characters and ended up with the same effect.

After all the yapping and drama about and with the final five over the course of seasons 3 and 4, I am still confused about who they were, why they did the thngs they did, why any of it matters. Oh yeah, and  how cavalierly (for the convenience of the writers) they could switch their allegiances. It’s not that they were flawed like everybody else, that’s fine. They were just so, uh, machine-like in the suddenness with which they could turn on a freind or fellow Cylon.

Ultimately. there are just too many mysteries either left unanswered, or answered in some hooey-wooey way that sounds deep but means little. Did the Cylons exist before humans? Are they like the compass in Lost, stuck forever in a time loop with no origin? What happened to the decision not use technology? Earth later seems exactly like Earth earlier.

And I always have a bit of a problem when ‘God’s plan’ necessitates the death of 4o gazillion people to get from point A to point B.

That bizarre last line of Baltar-angel’s. after Caprica-angel shares more of God’s plan was….you know, I haven’t got my thesaurus handy, so I am just going to settle for stupid.  “You know, it doesn’t like to be called that.” It? Don’t set me up for a sequel when you’ve just burned me on the foundation

If the he film-makers indeed had a plan, it was sparse and not very hepful. Maybe it was a bad plan, maybe they tried to monkey with it as they went along, but the end result is a shambling, lurching drama, uplifted by an excellent cast; the tremendous promise of the first two seasons fractures into  a series of episodes, presumably connected but only tenuously explained, too many of which are left unresolved.

I will say this, though, even with its flaws, it is still preferable to the original.