The Thing About BSG This Season

is that it's hopelessly dark, as always, but without the greatness. It's not the darkness itself that made it a good show. It was a combination of things: great writing, acting, directing, art direction, music, and just a general commitment to the world and the piece as a whole by everyone involved.

Now, pieces have been falling off for two seasons and it's pretty much JUST dark, no longer good. It's like the people who created the characters and situations were body-snatched by aliens who have access to their memories but no inherent understanding of human nature or of nuance. Take Roslyn and Adama. Their bond was romantic, certainly, but not literally romantic, as in I-want-to-date-you romantic. In turning their relationship into an ordinary sexual one, the writers have pretty much destroyed what we loved about each of them separately and together. They were two sides of the same lonely-at-the-top archetype, and now ... they're just a couple.

(They could salvage it by turning them into a real archetype -- like maybe Isis and Osiris, where Adama would get symbolically chopped up and distributed around the galaxy and Roslyn would have to collect his pieces. Or something. --- Oo! Adama should try to jump in a shuttle and the shuttle blows up and Roslyn goes around obsessively collecting the shuttle pieces from where they've been strewn all around by the screwed up jump. The last piece is a sealed part of the cabin with air in it and she finds him still alive. Or something. See? I can do this better than they can now. --- I know they're supposed to be Adam and Eve, barred from Eden, but that's worn thin, and the whole point of Adam and Eve is original sin and fertility, and Adama and Roslyn aren't really fitting into either of those plays.)

The same thing happened in season three with Starbuck and Apollo. They were the classic, archetypal, hopeless unrequited love scenario, and oh ... so well done. They pulled in all kinds of mythical issues. Like the classic Judaic one: do I marry my dead brother's widow? or the Greco/Roman unrequited incest issue with twins Apollo and Diana. But now, they're just characters that had a tawdry affair.

(And hey, what's with the men getting the mythical names and the women not so much? Thrace is a place of little significance and Roslyn?)

Who's making this show now, anyway? And what did they do with the geniuses who did the first two seasons?