I’ve just done watching the third season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. It’s not the best TV show I’ve ever watched, but I haven’t got a job at the moment, my 360 is largely bereft of decent games, and I’ve already watched all five seasons of The Wire (which cured the cold I had at the time, incidentally).

If you haven’t seen the third season of Battlescar Gelacticus then you might want to stop right here. That’s the only spoiler warning you’re gonna get.

I stopped watching Heroes because, let’s face it, the quality took a serious nosedive around episode 1 of the second season. If I had to point to a moment where it absolutely positively jumped the shark, it’s gotta be when the new Spock killed Veronica Mars on the beach. For the love of all that is holy, did she piss off one of the writers? Incidentally, if you’re reading this Tina Fey, and you want me to stop watching 30 Rock, likewise, kill off Katrina Bowden’s character, Cerie. I’ll just watch Arrested Development on DVD for the rest of my life.

So Battletoad Spartacus most certainly nuked the fridge (ooh, how up to date I am) at some point in the third season. There are so many possible candidates for nomination, let alone the actual prize, that it’s difficult to know where to start. It could be the Cyclon three-way between the British dude from Bridget Jones’ Diary, the Ford model and Xena Warrior Princess (I had to look her up on imdb.com incidentally, cos I had no idea who she was, oh it’s Lucy Lawless). It could be the babbling precog in the vat of KY-Jelly who everyone seems to ignore for spouting gibberish, until the posh British dude says, er hang on, you might want to actually listen to the lubricated muppet. Perhaps it’s the fact that they didn’t just allow Helo to carry on getting biblical with the defective vending machine, instead of conveniently sucking him and the misguided replicant out of the nearest airlock, but instead allowed him to get away with manner of mutiny and murder.

Or how about Brit in disguise Jamie Bamber wearing a fatsuit and shedding what looked to be about 4 stone in an episode and a half with just a mere mention of a skipping rope (and it explains how he managed to get so fat so fast, whereby in a later episode there is a fleet-wide food shortage). I could also mention the ridiculous boxing match between Peewee Adama and the blonde fighter-pilot chick which ends with them in a good old fashioned clinch, punch drunk and whispering sweet blood-bubbles in each other’s ears, while everyone walks off in disgust, mirroring the reaction of the audience at home. Also ran is the female Kirk Benedict (Faceman from the A-Team, yeah!!) bursting into a misty cloud of space-debris only to pop up in the rousing season finale of All Along the Watchtower as if nothing happened. Which let’s face it, means she’s more than likely a frakkin Cylon.

Which brings me neatly to the Starfleet Academy Award for biggest thing wrong with Season 3 of Battleship Potemtica, and the award goes to, blah blah and so on… the Human Disease which Kills the Cylons! Hear me out on this one, because it goes to the very root of why that for all the things Battlemoth Spatula gets right, they are utterly undermined by this shocking piece of near-sighted writing.

Ok, so if you recall, there is a Cylon base station floating about full of the thus-far revealed seven Cylon ‘skinjobs’ (Phil K Dick called, he wants his dignity back) all keeling over and being generally quite poorly, because they pulled in some beacon from outerspace that some filthy human had sneezed on 2000 years before. Okay, so far so Andromeda Strain. I can buy all this, cos the milk ain’t sour, and finally the pathetic meatbags have a weapon they can use against the machines. Hurrah and rejoice.

Then there’s the whole thing about how this biological disease could become biomechanical and that should any of the Cylons die and respawn into their bathtub of lubricant it would infect the whole Cylon race. So the Admiral’s bratty son comes up with the sublime idea of sneaking up on the Cylon’s KY-Jelly factory and spraying the floor of the brig with the poorly Cylons, thus infecting the whole Alien Resurrection ship in the process. A genuinely decent idea, only marred by Helo suffocating them on the behest of his terminator girlfriend before they can get in proper download range (Cylon wifi is good, but not that good). Everyone looks a bit silly, but not as silly as they do to the audience at home sitting on their cheeto-stained couches, when they collectively decide not to do a frakkin thing about it. Oh well, they say, best be moving on. Helo’s alright by us.

So the colossal and unmitigated dick-move error on behalf of all of the writers, producers and directors of the show is this. If they have a disease, described by them as a ‘biological weapon’, then why after the above plan goes tits-up, is it never mentioned again? Humans are immune. Conveniently, so is the Battlebarge’s pet Cylon (something to do with a placenta?), but they know full well that are still plenty of Cylons running around any of the other numerous ships in the fleet. So knowing this, and having taken blood samples from all of the infected Cylons that they had in the brig, and further knowing that this virus happily lives in a vacuum for a couple millennia, why not, I dunno, PUT IT IN THE WATER. Or on all the door handles, or in the food, or in the washing powder, or on the tip of sharp sticks. If it doesn’t hurt humans and is cyanide to Cylons, I dunno about you, but I’d be using it as wallpaper.

That way, the pedestrian humans could have continued their quest for Earth (I hope it’s a present day one, and they have to infiltrate the academic institutions of the world it to bring its technology up to date before the Cylons arrive, er hang on…) safe in the knowledge that there are no friggin stowaway Cylons on board. And more importantly, they’d immediately uncover the remaining five unrevealed Cylons, about when they start coughing, falling over and dying, thus avoiding the utter catastrophe that was the final episode of Season 3. There would be no nasty surprises, and just in case you haven’t seen it, it reveals that four of the main characters, who have had the temerity of walking around in front of the camera for most of the season (or more), are in fact toaster-loving skinjob Skynet replicants of the Cylon variety. In all manner of douchebaggery, it’s 3 of the main-main characters, and 1 minor recurring character, who have all between dispatched their share of Cylons in the past, making them dirty great hypocritical morally-ambiguous motherfrakkers. Which is just a giant writing-by-committee clusterfuck. It’s a good job no one watched this show, cos otherwise they might have organised one of those internet petitions (that so work) to get it cancelled.



Just so you know, it’s Chief, the Jock from Caprica, the drunk XO and the President’s new Miss Lyningham (cos she died in a car accident). Yeah, I was as insulted as you are. My intelligence took some pretty hefty jabs that day, I can tell you. Not least of all, because my intelligence was telling me that all these frakkin idiots should be dead already.

I’ve not watched the fourth season yet. I’ve half a mind not to, but I’ve got it on DVD and it’d be rude not to. I have the giddy delight of finding out who the fifth and final Cylon is. As I said above, it’s probably the girl Faceman, but that might be too obvious. In fact, I’d bet a squeezy bottle of pancake mix that the hot Ford model Cylon points directly into the camera and says, “It’s You. You’re the last Cylon” and the whole thing ends with a Vaudeville dance number.

Or someone will spoil it for me in the comments.