point me to the nearest airlock

I don’t watch TV. Well, occasionally The Amazing Race on my snowy, cable-less screen, and for a while there Everybody Loves Raymond, but that’s it.

Has TV writing improved in recent years? Apparently: West Wing, 24 and Heroes, and maybe Lost. I know this from the twittering of those who declare their everlasting love for television. Workplace chitchat has elevated a notch or two, hinting at higher-quality idiot box fare. Still, not for me: with a family to play with, a house to fix and a book to write, I don’t have the time.

So it says a lot that the new Battlestar Galactica hooked me.

Out of nostalgic curiosity I rented Sci Fi Channel’s three-hour miniseries, and got sucked straight in by emotions that evoked the horror of 9/11. The campy cheese of the 1980’s series has been replaced by a gritty portrayal of a too-flawed humanity struggling against the calculated perfection of its own robotic offspring. Humans, who worship a pantheon of gods with icons and incense, use every break from fighting cylons to fight themselves; cylons, who have evolved to look human, worship a single transcendent God with missionary zeal and live forever by downloading their consciousness upon death. Who would you give the better odds?

When the first season began I had a problem: no cable. Geek that I was, I schlepped myself over to my mother-in-law’s house every Friday evening, and didn’t miss a single episode. Then Apple’s iTunes store picked up the show, and with some mental math I realized $1.99 per episode wasn’t much more than the gas it took to drive to mother-in-law’s. Every installment since iTunes’ first offer now sits on my hard drive.

Yes, I thrilled when Time named Galactica 2006 TV Show of the Year. No one else I knew watched it, so I couldn’t participate in watercooler recaps – but at least Time confirmed I wasn’t crazy. The show’s writers were crafting something intelligent, something gripping and edgy – so much so that at the beginning of season three I broke one of my self-imposed blogging rules to write my only-ever entertainment review.

Suffice to say, the show’s writers impressed me.

And suddenly they didn’t.

Of course, all along some episodes were better than others, and a few story arcs made awkward turns. As a TV newbie I figured such frustrations were the plight of any show’s fans, akin to the ups and downs of rooting for a sports team.

But after the latest episode, I’m done. Which surprises me – I’ve never enjoyed a TV show as much, and certainly never paid $1.99 a week for one.

But that’s it. Finito.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m busier now, and so have less patience for even an hour spent poorly. Still, the writers’ accumulated missteps are dragging Galactica back into 1980’s cheese. Consider these broken rules of writing:

*** spoilers below ***

1. Actions must have consequences. But Helo, the officer in love with cylon Sharon, never faces consequences for his. In his new career of defending cylons he has 1) murdered another officer, 2) thwarted a biological attack that would have saved humanity from the cylon threat forever, and 3) sent Sharon into cylon hands to retrieve their child, even though she could have been tortured for her intelligence. Upon each incident Admiral Adama has not only shrugged, but actively shielded him from repercussions (in one case provoking a civil war to do so). Worse, for a person whose decisions continually keep humanity at risk, Helo’s one of the flattest characters on the show — zero backstory, zero character flaws.

2. Keep the plot fresh. Yet Galactica repeats itself: humans land on Planet X, cylons arrive, humans are trapped. Not only has this cycle recurred three times in only two and a half seasons, each time it has been used as a cliffhanger either between seasons, or during a mid-season siesta: “Wait and see how they get off the planet this time!”

3. Don’t preach. Originally, cylons operated in smooth accord; now every episode shows them bickering, fighting, even killing each other. Get it? They’re just like us, get it? Here’s another example! Sorry, but I’m not interested in a perpetual “Cylons Are People Too” sermon (along with the strict materialistic philosophy it implies), especially as it’s a departure from the show’s original thrust, as well as the very threat that made cylons so coldly fearsome in the first place.

4. Be consistent with your own character development. “Cylon psychology is based on projection.” So says Caprica Six to Baltar, fueling suspense over whether he himself is a cylon. Yet in no other episode do cylons mention or even exhibit projection as an aspect of their psychology. This is worse than oversight, since the show now delves full-tilt into cylon culture and religion. “Projection” was just a throw-away line to make Baltar suspect himself; cylon psychology isn’t “based” on it at all.

5. Don’t congratulate yourself on what a great story you’re telling. First we met four known cylons; gradually others were revealed, giving us seven. From the initial mini-series we know there are twelve models in all, a suspense point keeping viewers wondering who else might be a sleeper cylon – but the writers have dragged out this tease in a long dry spell with zero reveals. Now we learn the final five are, in fact, “the Final Five” – a mysterious set of models unknown even to cylons themselves, so holy that prying into their identity is sacrosanct. This late concept is an arbitrary tack-on, apparently added so the writers could imprison Baltar on a base star without revealing the final secret cylons.  It could just as easily have been the final four, or six, or whatever other number the writers had happened to conceal until they repackaged them as a grand lump mystery. Worse, it functions as a self-congratulatory move: writers celebrating with religious enthusiasm the build-up of their own suspense questions.

6. Don’t abuse suspension of disbelief. Humans and cylons skeedaddle away from Planet X when the local star goes supernova. Coincidence? Unacceptably so — even though the writers embrace it as deliberate theme development through a quick line of dialogue: “I can’t get my head around these odds. That human and cylon both converge on this planet at this exact moment, just as the star is going supernova.” The implication is that either humanity’s gods or the cylons’ God has orchestrated this moment (both, really, since the writers will eventually reveal them to be the same). But I don’t care about a show that invents deities who actually move the plot. It’s enough that humans believe in gods and that cylons believe in a God, and that each race finds signs along the way seeming to confirm their beliefs. Fine. The movie Troy walked this line expertly, hinting at gods while allowing humans to work out their own destinies. But writers renege on viewers’ suspension of disbelief when they create gods who steer the plot directly. Certainly the supernova’s timing can be explained in no other way – unless it’s truly meant as a coincidence, in which case I must recite one of my school system’s standards for reading materials: plots must be “well-constructed with logical development and a minimum of coincidence.”

7. Too much of a good thing is too much. Starbuck is a wonderfully dimensional character, both macho and frail, religious and irreverent. Now the writers hint that she’s even more – a cylon perhaps, or a prophetess, or even a god. But any more mileage out of this rough-n-ready fighter pilot will stretch her beyond her already exaggerated status. Simultaneously a drunkard hotshot, a sultry sex diva, a spiritual devotee and a military strategist, Starbuck is now, as a cylon has told her and as events have confirmed, “destined” – for what? Overuse, eclipsing both other characters and believability.

8. Story should drive the plot, not budget. Seven cylons – yet we regularly see just five. President Roslyn’s aides – one killed for no good reason in a tangential episode, the other frequently absent. Someone’s skimping on the casting, writing episodes not only with the fewest possible characters (a crafty budgeting strategy), but with too few, leaving out those previously established by the series. Plot should not be dictated by casting. If actors aren’t available for filming, either pay them more to convince them to be available, or replace them with other actors. Consistent faces aren’t as important as a consistent storyline. When four cylons yell at a fifth that they’re all in agreement against her, viewers shouldn’t be wondering why, sans explanation, two of them aren’t there.

*** end spoilers ***

So that’s it for me: the crescendo of missteps has grown too loud, drowning out the story. If I didn’t have to drive elsewhere to watch Galactica, or pay $1.99 to download each episode, I’d probably continue. Free is, after all, free. But with so many writing gaffes, Galactica’s no longer worth the cost.

I suppose most TV fans come to points like this, when they’re fed up even with their favorite shows. Again, it must be like sports fans, who weather losing seasons and become disgusted with players and coaches. Thus my foray into televisionhood is complete: with Galactica I’ve experienced many highs, and now come full circle to the lows.

Someone point me to the nearest airlock, please. No, I don’t care if there’s a planet nearby, or another ship — I’m ready to disembark now.

UPDATE (January 2009): I’m surprised Moore fessed this up.  Apparently he considers it a brilliant plot design instead of a cover-up afterthought.

the forester, January 2007: Now we learn the final five are, in fact, “the Final Five” – a mysterious set of models unknown even to cylons themselves, so holy that prying into their identity is sacrosanct. This late concept is an arbitrary tack-on, apparently added so the writers could imprison Baltar on a base star without revealing the final secret cylons. It could just as easily have been the final four, or six, or whatever other number the writers had happened to conceal until they repackaged them as a grand lump mystery. Worse, it functions as a self-congratulatory move: writers celebrating with religious enthusiasm the build-up of their own suspense questions.

Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, in a January 2009 interview: It was somewhere in the course of the third season [that the possibility was first raised.] We killed Ellen early that season and we didn’t have an inkling of that at that point. But at the point that we killed Ellen, around the same time frame, I was starting to come up with the idea that there were five Cylons that had yet to be revealed. At the beginning of the third season, Baltar had gone to live on the Cylon base ship for a string of episodes. And it was really that plot move that threw into relief — well, once Baltar’s over in the Cylon world, why wouldn’t he see all 12 of them? How could we get around that and parcel that out? Then I had this idea, well, what if it’s not random? What if there’s a meaning to the fact that we haven’t seen the five of them? And that’s how the Final Five became part of the mythos.