At this point the condition of the fictional vehicle 'Battlestar Galactica'--falling apart, patched together with magical Cylon goo-- is a pretty good metaphor for the series itself.  Last night's fourth from final episode was also a pretty good metaphor for the series' final season-- an initial three acts of screechingly awful exposition going nowhere, followed by a final act filled with softcore porn and explosions.

What started out as an inventive reimaging of a derivative and supremely schlocky space opera has become itself little more than pointless soap opera in a science fictional setting.  Much of the blame for this rests with the franchise owners.  The Scifi Channel has dragged this show out long past the point where it should ended--for the sole purpose of selling supremely tasteless ad campaigns to fried chicken franchises.  But much blame also rests with the show's creative staff for increasingly sloppy writing, increasing reliance on shock tactics, and the simple core fact that they no longer have a story to tell.

That story was summed up nicely in previous seasons opening credits--50,000 some-odd survivors of a nuclear holocaust (poignantly, the number continually decreased) wandering thru space in search of a legendary lost home world that may or may not be our own Planet Earth. In pursuit: the human-created machine intelligences--Cylons--responsible for the holocaust.

That story ended when the last season ended.  Earth was found and found to be a radioactive ruin, victim of its own Cylon holocaust many thousands of years before.

All that's left now are loose ends and sensationalism.  The audience is diminished as well.  If you are currently watching BSG, you are either someone has nothing better to do on a Friday night than watch hot cyborg babes perform unlikely seductions while waiting for the next outer space dogfight to commence... or you've been watching the show and you just want the writers to answer the questions that kept you tuning in over the last five years.

Last night's episode was a disservice to both audiences.  Whether you were a drooling fanboy waiting for Grace Park to skin out of as much clothing as Broadcast Standards permit or one of the diminish few who want to know how Starbuck came back from the dead, you had to sit thru forty five excruciatingly awful minutes to get there.

The episode was dominated by two parallel story lines: in one narrative, the character of 'Chief' Galen Tyrol must deal with his feelings for a literally returned from the dead lost love who is soon to face trial for treason.  In the other narrative, Kara Thrace, aka Starbuck-- herself returned from the dead under unexplained circumstances-- recalls episodes from her childhood in conversations with an enigmatic piano player who has begun performing in the (inevitable) ship's saloon.

Both story lines drag on interminably through awkward dialog and leaden set pieces, then speed up in the last act to a cliffhanger ending with just enough sex, violence, and new plot twists to retain most of the remaining audience for the last three episodes. But in the process, so many liberties have been taken with the show's setting, premise, and characters that it is impossible to imagine that anyone is watching because actually care about the outcome.

It is fairly evident at this point that BSG creator Ronald Moore and his writers are simply making this shit up as they go along and not even bothering to keep the details straight. In one episode, cancer-stricken President Laura Roslin all but abdicates her office to the younger and more compassionate Lee Adama. But when a subsequent episode requires an uncompromising authority figure to extradite Boomer to an almost certain execution, President Laura is back in harness and as feisty as ever. In a universe where there is one extremely well-known means of coming back from the dead--being a resurrectable Cylon--no one once wonders if that might just be how Starbuck got to build a funeral pyre for her own corpse. The back-story and capabilities of Cylons change from one week to the next as suit the writer's convenience. The technology that propels Humans and Cylons through the galaxy lacks even that much consistency.

Good drama, whether it is science fiction or cop shows or horse opera, consists of situations and characters that audiences believe in and care about.  The blessing and curse of SF is that those scenarios and characters are not part of the world as we know it.  They can be, for example, humanoid machines or refuges from a planetary holocaust fleeing thru interstellar space.  But while that freedom from every day reality offers story-telling opportunities unmatched in any other genre, it also comes with liabilities that other genres lack.

The greatest of these liabilities is that a lack of internal consistency is an even greater audience turnoff than it is in more 'reality-based' forms of drama.  Anything can happen in a fictional narrative.  But when the point is reached that everything can happen, it ceases to be interesting.