After the first two seasons, which were damn fine, I’d actually looked forward to the rest of the series…only to discover that it would slide into scenery chewing and cliche recycling and a pretty much complete lack of imagination.

I’ve heard all the arguments in support of the show and I think they’re mostly hot air, just desperate people wanting to be part of a fad, a momentary craze that detracts from the field of fiction rather than adding to it and which coincidentally relieves fans of any burden of critical thought because as long as fans support something that others call “the best thing on TV”, they don’t have to exercise any critical thought themselves. Objectively I can see the attraction of this to many people; if they don’t think about it, they don’t have to consider how this show says nothing that hasn’t been said before, and better, they don’t have to think about how setting events in space, or in any merely different backround, doesn’t change the event itself. As far as I’m concerned, putting things like torture and suicide bombers and collateral damage and whatever else into the BG setting doesn’t add a damn thing to my perspective on those topics because I already live in a real world where those things actually exist; knowing how fictional characters feel about them helps me not at all, particularly when the show completely avoids taking a stand on so many things.

Then there’s the fact that the show is intellectually bankrupt and has been for some time. Look at the effort put into the Starbuck story-arc, only to have her (her?) disappear without even a puff of smoke. And no, “God did it” is not an explanation or a reason or anything at all that has any place in good fiction.

Character development? There’s a lot of folks talking about the character development in the show as though that’s the only criterion a good show must meet and that worries me because I’ve never seen as many dysfunctional characters in one show….if any serious number of people felt any real engagement with any large number of characters in BG then I might as well start reading textbooks on aberrant psychology, at least then I’d be referring to real people rather than fictional ones.

I’m not going to itemize my complaints with the show, so many other people have done so that I’d just be beating a dead horse. About the only constructive thing I can say is that many people clearly need to spend some time reading non-fiction so as to discover that real life is infinitely stranger than anything fiction has thought up. That BG was “the best thing on TV’ winds up as nothing more than a depressing comment on the state of TV in general, and how little taste a lot of people seem to have. BG has merely filled a niche, it’s become the Seinfeld of the inaccurately-named Sci-fi genre; a show about nothing.