Zub Tales

The Season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica was like an acid-induced writing seminar titled “We Have No Fucking Clue What We’re Doing”.

Characters catching strains of a sitar-and-electric-guitar-squealing cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” in the walls of the ship, going so far as to actually spout lyrics from the song as lines of dialog. Just rereading that last sentence feels like I made that shit up, but that’s what actually happened – the show was spontaneously possessed by the spirit of Bollywood! Ending the episode with the same Watchtower cover tune blaring, full-on with lyrics drowning out the regular sound and voices was horrifying icing on the cake.

When Ron Moore says that he came up with these big plot twists “this season as I worked toward the finale” I can plainly say “No guff”. Massive screwy plot alteration midway through the season is exactly what it felt like – no forethought, no consistent threads and no over arching plan for the show. The sheer number of flaming hoops the writers will need to jump through to make any logic out of the 4 Cylons revealed in the finale is staggering. They bent their own story over a barrel. Even the actors seemed detached from the whole thing, losing their regular verve as they spouted lines that felt wildly out of place.

Just like the terrible “1 year in 10 minutes” end of Season 2, they jerked their audience sideways for the sake of doing it and sucked away any empathy I had for the cast. Shock endings can be great when they don’t feel completely random, pointless and out of step with everything else the show has presented up to that point.

Bob Dylan by way of Bollywood 80’s hair band rock… Seriously, did that actually happen? I’m still in shock.