The body count was far too high for me this time around. It smacks of desperation to me for so many primary characters to die, especially in a series that is ostensibly about the survival of humanity. Dualla deserved better. Zerek deserved better. And the Tigh/Six baby did too. You can tell when a series is running out of ideas when they start writing in random pregnancies, and often series where it is obviously a desperate device will then kill said baby. And we got that here. It reminds me of that Promised Land episode (and believe me, my mother was a fan and I would never have watched the show on my own) where the mom had a baby. It was a two-parter and I predicted it would die next week. And it did. Because when you've already got seven people crammed into a trailer, are you really going to throw a baby into that mix week to week? There's also a danger of characters like that ruining a show's dynamic. Dil hurt Rugrats some, and then the show was destroyed by Kimmie. Anyway, the Tigh/Six fetus in the end was a red herring and a waste of our time.
There were a lot of wasted elements in season four. So many elements were started, then either ignored or written off quickly. While they tried to make the most out of the Baltar cult, there just wasn't a story there, and it always felt forced to me. The mythology of the series was almost entirely rewritten, so not everything works together. The "Face of the Enemy" webisodes implied that alliance with the Cylons was a bad idea, but this never really comes about. NOTHING bad really comes of it, so we were being teased with nothing. We had a similar issue with the return of Kara Thrace, which still doesn't make sense. Her appearance and the slap-dash explanation thrown in were about as bad as all the times Baltar was dead but then wasn't on the old series. And then as we got to the finale, we had Ellen turn out to be a Cylon, which completely changes things on New Caprica, sudden mutinies, suicides, loads more annoying Roslin, a magic bullet and a ship coming apart at the seams. It all seemed manufactured to end, rather than naturally ending.
There was some good amidst it all. Once the damage had been done and the mythology had been confused, at least they made an attempt to make some sense of it in "No Exit". And there's that really nice moment when Tigh is talking about love and says he feels it less when he says the words. I think many men relate to that idea, and that's probably the best little piece in the whole season. It's good that they finally do get to Earth, and that a number of points from the old series are hit in some way or other. I don't like the reaveal that this is our distant past, as it leaves no good explanation for the quotes from Shakespeare, Defoe, Emily Dickensen, or "All Along the Watchtower".
The "colony" where Cavil was conveniently hiding was nothing of the kind; it was a ship. So when was this ship built? Why was this ship built? Was it always hidden there? I didn't like that element at all.
Lee no longer being a pilot ended up dragging his character down because there was soon very little for him to do. He just became a politician, and after awhile they didn't know what to do with that. So that arbitrarily made him President. While the build-up to his leaving the service felt organic to me, what came next never did.
It's a shame that after the good that was Razor, the series returned to a pattern of fits and starts; sound and fury that signified very little. Not everything tied together, and that's too bad. Still, despite the didactic nature of it, the show did return to the themes it began with in the miniseries. Now, I hated that theme, but at least there's a certain poetry to that. And yet the cyclical nature of things ended up being the point of the show. And if that's the case, why does any of this matter anyway? All this happened before. With rumor of Bryan Singer doing his own version soon, must we accept that this will all happen again?
Best episodes: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner", "No Exit", "Daybreak" (though there's a lot wrong with it)
Worst episodes: "The Ties That Bind", "Sometimes a Great Notion"
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