Battlestar Galactica - Season Three

What a great series - the acting is great, the writing is top-notch and the effects are wonderful, too. Season 3 is shaping up to be the best so far (I haven't started watching season 4 yet). Great character development - even Adm. Adama has his flaws exposed this season.

Don't get me wrong--I loved the miniseries, the first two seasons, and Razor. But Season Three is a total disappointment. Well over 75% of the episodes focus strictly on the boring and hamfisted occult aspects of the show. Absent from this three-quarters of the season is any hint of the military and political drama that made previous seasons so compelling.

Avoid. So say we all.

This is a great series with a lot of dimensions and evolution of characters. The special effects are outstanding and visually is quite captivating.

Forget that this takes place in Space. Forget the Campy 70's show where everyone slapped their best friend on the back and sang Kumbaya at the end of every episode. Forget all that. This show rocks from start to finish. It is truly "THE BEST DRAMA" I have ever seen. I loan out my copy of the miniseries trying to evangelize the show to those who can't get past the space/70's thing. It will be bitter/sweet to get this season's dvd's because the show will end after this. Frack!!

I consider this show to have had great potential. The special effects are great. Everything has the look and feel of a gritty ship, a collection of people on the run in spaceships. And the acting and dialog is very good, believable most of the time. This season suffers from several flaws that knock it down from fantastic to merely ordinary.

First and foremost, the lack of any heroes. I'm not sure there are any characters in the show I have much affection for. Starbuck was annoying from day one. When she was written out of the show (I assume she's probably back in season four, but I don't have cable, so that will have to wait), I was happy that I'd get a break from her for at least a few episodes. There is hardly any joy on Galactica, and little reason for any. They're going to all connive and bicker and backstab and frak and booze their way back to Earth, apparently. Just when I start liking any of the characters, they go off and do something half-cocked or mean or stupid or selfish, and I return to ambivalence or outright hatred for them.

In season three, there are too many (one would be too many) soap opera-ish episodes focusing on the sordid personal affairs and traumas of the sordid characters. As a result, finding the way to Earth and trying to understand what the Cylons are playing at -- the main plot arcs -- get cheated. In other words, they do a lot of treading water.

Visually, the frequent use of handheld cameras that bounce around -- the field of view veering off left, right, up, down, jerking, jiggling constantly -- is irritating. If one were watching this on a big screen it could induce motion sickness. I can't remember the first season's visuals, but I'm sure this criticism applies to season two as well. If you've made it this far into the series, you've gotten used to it. It still can be an annoyance.

But for all that, the show has its moments. Some of the courtroom scenes in the trial of The Great Weasel Baltar are particularly effective. The first few episodes telling of the escape from slavery to the Cylons on New Caprica are almost worthy of a motion picture. These successes make the weakness of the episodes in between all the more glaring.

I'm looking at season three as something I had to mostly wade through to get to what will hopefully be an impressive conclusion to the big mysteries they've developed in the series.