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Who Gives a Frak about the Final Fifth?

What’s the point of Battlestar Galactica this season, really? Or any season? As I traverse the rocky ground of the intertubes, avoiding the stabby landscape of messageboards and blogs dedicated to genre entertainments, I find this question being asked a lot. A whole hell of a lot actually. This final season of Battlestar Galactica is maybe the most divisive thing to happen to its fanbase since the literal dividing of season 2. A division that will be not only replicated after this Friday’s episode, but lengthened until January at the earliest.

Galactica fans know how to endure frustration, but this season seems to really testing that resolve...

It makes me wonder why people are really watching this show. What it is they’re getting out of it. Some seem to be watching it solely for the answers to riddles and puzzles posed way back in Season One, much in the same way people obsessively watch Lost. It’s not so much television as it is a passive game of Tetris, or watching over someone’s shoulder as they put together a jigsaw puzzle. Not to demean Lost. It’s a fun show, but the depth, the humanity that the best episodes of Battlestar make you feel, those elements have no place in the relentless march to the end of the lab maze that Lost shoves it’s viewers through.

To watch Battlestar solely in those terms is to only get a fraction of what the show has to offer. And I think that’s why this season has gotten the reaction it’s gotten. Each episode has its own tone, its own pace, and its exploring issues while setting plot pieces up. These pieces aren’t giant corner pieces of the Galactica jigsaw, so people get frustrated. The tonal shifts from week to week are sometimes jarring and disorienting, so people get frustrated. The routine that serialized television works itself into isn’t present this season. Who’s the Fifth? Where’s Earth? Who’s the Dying Leader? What are the Head-People? Why aren’t any frakking answers coming? Why am I watching Chief’s harpy puke in a bar? Why am I watching Baltar’s harem cry because he shaved? Why is Apollo giving Badger from Firefly a dog? What’s the point of this?

The point isn’t the events. The point is the aftermath of those events. That’s been Battlestar’s modus operandi since 2003. It started with an apocalypse, and moved from there. The reveal of the Final Fifth isn’t as important as watching how the characters deal with that information. The death of the characters is shocking, but it’s watching the characters adapt and move from that death that moves this show forward. They’re journeying through outer space but it’s the introspective questioning that’s been fueling the engine of this show for 4 seasons.

So to me, this is potentially the best season. Certainly, with 9 episodes down, it matches, punch for punch, the quality of Season One. It’s not that stuff isn’t happening. It is. Maybe it’s not so cut and dried as “Cylons found us. Fight and then jump. Fight amongst ourselves. Cylons found us. Fight Cylons and jump. Lather, Rinse, Frak and Repeat. All this has happened before, So Say We All,” And it’s that lack of foothold that’s causing people to slip. There’s no real central protagonist/antagonist conflict this season, it’s a bunch of exhausted humans (and Cylons) broken and reaching the end of their rope, but the fact that Battlestar took the puzzles of Lost and shoved as much allegory, feeling, and strong character work as they could inbetween the plot points makes it so much more worthy as a piece of entertainment. Each episode rewards repeat viewings beyond simply freeze framing moments to scan the periphery for hints to be sprinkled on messageboards like Johnny Appleseed growing speculation trees.

For example: “The Hub” isn't really about blowing the resurrection hub. It’s not really about D'Anna revealing potentially revealing the 5, who would then reveal the way to Earth. The Hub is about Laura Roslin learning to love people again, and not just ruthlessly lead them somewhere. It's about Helo's faith in the Cylon/Human alliance being utterly shaken. It's about the concept of forgiveness itself, forgiveness of oneself, and how different and difficult such a thing can be, especially in the face of an entire way of life potentially just completely disappearing forever. Each episode this season has layers simply beyond the Lost-ian solving of puzzles and putting characters in place to be knocked over on the way to “the answer.”

To me, it's not who the fifth is, although that's fun to speculate on in an online puzzle/mental masturbation sort of way, for a little bit at least. I don’t even really care who the fifth is, although I have my theories (in order: 1) Tom Zarek 2) Anastasia Dualla 3) Felix Gaeta 4)Romo Lampkin 5) Karl Agathon) the hook for me is how the discovery of the fifth is going to seriously screw up these characters I’ve grown to genuinely care about, in a way most filmed or written fiction has rarely grabbed me. It's not the revelation, it's the aftermath. Which to me, is the whole point of the show. The revelation is there solely to put the aftermath in motion, and it's the aftermaths that fuel this show, that make it go.

Should the mid-season finale wrap up and that Fifth cylon isn’t revealed? I’m not gonna see that as a cop-out. There’s 10 episodes to go starting in January, and there’s 10 episodes I’ve seen and re-seen that I’ll re-see again because each time I sit down and hit play, something new, some nuance I missed before, slaps me in the face and makes me re-evaluate all I’ve watched before. And to me, that’s the real truth of this show. That it speaks directly to our humanity and what its worth, and what it means to be human. It asks hard questions and delivers hard answers. They’re found in the aftermath of the big puzzle pieces landing on the characters heads. Don’t watch for the puzzle. Watch for the look in the eyes of the people putting it together, and see if there’s something to learn in there.