Battlestar Galactica thread

A terrible meltown? Or the most terrible meltdown in sci-fi television history? Discuss in the comments.

UPDATE: Past the jump, check out John Aravosis of Americablog, who has found out why eveything turned to shit.

Just watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. All I can say is, good riddance. Never has a TV show gone from brilliance to crap in such short order. It's only the third season and they have already destroyed one of the best television shows ever. It's as if the writers all suffered a mass aneurysm this year. It's not even the same writers, it can't be (I think they moved the real writers over to the new spin-off - of course, if these are still the original writers, then they're really in trouble). It's 2am on a Monday morning, so I'm permitting myself a little latitude to vent about a TV show most of you probably haven't watched. But I love TV, and I know TV. This series was amazing television. And now it's pathetic, predictable, nauseatingly unbelievable crap. I just can't understand how something so good could so quickly turn so awful.

...

PS Okay, it's all making sense now. Check out this interview with the executive producer over at Salon.com. Basically, he says that a lot of the show is him just winging it and changing things at the last minute, "organically."

Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?

A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes.

And this:

We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly.... You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it.

And this:

In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.

That explains a lot. He just changes major parts of the plot on a moment's notice, at the last minute. Well, I got news for you. It shows.

UPDATE 2: There's going to be a straight-to-DVD movie prequel about the Battlestar Pegasus during the break. Perhaps we can all just will this spring season out of existince.