Battlestar Galactica, season 4.5

Those of us without cable just finished the new BSG series earlier this week. What started out in seasons 1 and 2 as a great little pressure cooker exploring tensions between military and civilian government while serving up great space battles (which, btw, Star Trek Voyager should have already done, but they flubbed it) turned into a relatively inchorent mess in seasons 3 and 4.

==spoilers==

I'm not really bothered by Kara being an angel who simply disappears at the end of the show and is never seen again; I'm not bothered by Caprica and Baltar being angels who close the series for us in somewhat trite fashion. However:

• I'm bothered by Adama doing an endless 2 steps forward, 2 steps back dance w.r.t. the cylons. The straw that broke my back was after he'd agreed to ally with the cylon renegades, after he'd agreed to put cylon goop onto Galactica's beams to try to save the ship, after he'd agreed to take his flag command to the renegade cylon base ship, after he uses Anders to find out where Hera is, he balks at having Anders plugged into the CIC. Give me a freakin' break! This is false drama the writers are creating.
  
  
• I'm bothered that the final cylon was a really irritating character that I'd been glad to be rid of. When Helen first comes back and interacts with Cavil, she's actually interesting, but as soon as she's back with Tigh (someone we could have done with a lot less of), she's obnoxious and irritating again.
  
  
• I'm bothered by everyone trying to solve their problems with drink.
  
  
• I'm even more bothered that most of the problems are finally dealt with by saying "god says so".
  
  
• I'm bothered that the opera house is just a shootout in the CIC, and that Caprica and Baltar "do their job of taking care of the human/cylon future" by dropping Hera right into Cavil's hands.
  
  
• I'm bothered that the writers think that 38,000 people will all agree to leave their medical technology behind, or that Lee Adama thinks in the first place that leaving all their technology behind will allow their descendants to avoid problems in the future. Since when is ignorance strength? I'd gotten the impression that Lee was a little smarter than that.

Now, if the writers had posited that the ships and equipment were so crapped out by the end of these four years that they were near-useless anyway, that I could deal with. And I did really like how they showed us the events in the colonies that led to the characters escaping the holocaust in the first place (except for Adama drinking in a strip club and vomiting in an alleyway) and I really liked Anders' interview with the sports reporter.