'Battlestar Galactica' recap: The End and the Beginning

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But that's nothing compared to what happened with Kara Thrace. For all of its religious overtones and prophetical trappings, Battlestar Galactica has been a show rooted in the real. It was defined by a very real holocaust and the harsh realities of a world lost, of shattered hope, that gave the show its shape. For characters to die, and come back from the dead, and vanish into thin air...feels like a betrayal of that fundamental premise. Is she an angel, as Baltar would claim? A collective figment of everyone's imagination? I know that Ron Moore has said that Kara is whatever we want her to be. I want her to make sense. (And who, exactly, was Kara the Harbinger of Death for? The Cylons? Not for the humans, clearly.) Drunk on Caprica with Lee, she revealed that her greatest fear was of not being remembered. Of being forgotten. No chance of that, to be sure. Kara ''Starbuck'' Thrace will remain one of the great modern television characters. I only wish that her ending honored her.

(Favorite Moment #10: Kara Thrace, with her guns back on. Felix Gaeta stirred up a hornets' nest with his mutiny, but in ''The Oath'' Starbuck shook off her soul-searching stupor, strapped on her pistolas, and started gunning down the offenders. ''I can do this all day.'' Amen, sister.)

Finally, 150,000 years later. In New York City. Head Baltar and Head Six peer over the shoulder of Ronald D. Moore himself (Angels? Devils?) as he read about the discovery of mitochondrial Eve, the woman to whom all of humanity can be traced. Hera. You know, of all the endings this episode had, the NYC one was my least favorite. Why hammer the point so friggin' hard? We get it. We're doing the very same thing the Colonies did, inventing artificial intelligence, letting technology run away from us. We would've gotten that without the CNBC reports of cutesy robots. The minute we saw the outline of Africa from space, we kinda knew where this was heading.

I've said it before, and I'll say it here: I don't begrudge Ron Moore his recalcitrance in ending Battlestar Galactica. It must be a simultaneously hard and joyous thing, making your way to the end of such a storytelling journey. Do I wish I'd gotten more answers? Sure. While not as reliant upon mystery and riddles as Lost, Battlestar Galactica had its share of lore, of arcana, of threads that seemed to be attached to the end of something larger. And we got a lot of those answers — that Cylon episode earlier this season delivered the goods (and The Plan promises to deliver more) — but there are still some that nag.

But some questions get answered, and some just lead to other questions. Such is life, such is Battlestar Galactica.

It's hard to summarize four years of a television show. It just is. It's hard to take in more than 80 hours of television and make any kind of real judgment about it. There's just so much to consider: the high points and the low, the nooks and the crannies, the roads taken and those left untraveled. BSG has been, for me, a revelatory experience. I grew up on science fiction and watched as Hollywood slowly knee-jerked and focus-grouped it into a shadow of its former self. Ron Moore, David Eick, their stellar writing staff, their multifaceted ensemble, and their nimble production team have rekindled my love for the genre. They've shown me that passion, dedication, and talent, all in service of a man with a vision, can work wonders.

To borrow from the original Big Willie, Battlestar Galactica was a television show; take it for all in all, I shall not look upon its like again.

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