Below are links to all my extant writing about Battlestar Galactica. (As was the case with Lost, much of the writing I did about this show was done for my old dayjob at Wizard Magazine and has been lost to countless website revamps and ownership changes.) I hope you enjoy it!
Episode 4.0.1-2: Razor
Episode 4.0.3-10
Episode 4.0.11-12
Episode 4.0.12 extra
Episode 4.5.1: Sometimes a Great Notion
Episode 4.5.2: A Disquiet Follows My Soul
Episode 4.5.3: The Oath
Episode 4.5.4: Blood on the Scales
Episode 4.5.5: No Exit
Episode 4.5.6: Deadlock
Episode 4.5.7: Someone to Watch Over Me
Episode 4.5.8: Islanded in a Stream of Stars
Episode 4.5.9: Daybreak Part 1
Episode 4.5.10: Daybreak Parts 2 & 3
Episode 4.5.10 [continued]
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Episode 4.5.10 bonus: Lost vs. Battlestar Galactica: The battle of the finales
Caprica Episode 1.1
Caprica Episodes 1.2-6
Tags: battlestar galactica, caprica, david eick, reviews, ronald d. moore, TV, TV reviews
In retrospect, this is great: “…that now it’s about the end stages of this particular human civilization–that they’re all too far gone to make it work anymore.” I didn’t take it that way at the time simply because I’ve never seen such a thing depicted on TV; no matter how dark things got, I fully expected them to come through at the end and rebuild something approximating their old society, with maybe some cultural/technological borrowing from the Cylon allies. Or, if (as seemed increasingly likely the closer we got to the end) they were going to wind up being our distant ancestors, then I figured they’d be forced by circumstances to abandon nearly everything— crashing on Earth with only a few survivors, etc. Voluntarily giving up all your history and your collective identity, because you’ve judged them and found them unworkable, is much harder to accept in fiction, and clearly a lot of viewers were pissed about it… but, as you say, the series really had been building to that for a long time.