Hey! They Cheated!

That's how I feel about the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica. They set us up at the end of season 2 for some big changes to the show, including one helluva conflict for us to watch the characters sort through. After the bludgeoned-by-theme season opener, things looked to be really entertaining. Lots of good, juicy stuff for the characters we've come to know and love over two seasons to work themselves out of. But, no, we got cheated. The big bad Cylons were swatted aside in half of one episode to let the humans escape to get back on their ships and in search of Earth, which is right where we left off in Season 2.

"But, wait," said the teaser for episode 5, "there's gonna be tension between those who resisted on New Caprica and those who didn't!" OK, so it's a focus shift after a major wuss-out of some tension in actually escaping the planet, but it looks like we're still going to get our characters in hard places and watch them work out of it.

Um, no. By the end of Episode 5, everything is right as rain. The President is Laura Roslyn again, and she waves her magic wand and says, "The past is the past." Apollo's going to lose his weight. Everything's right back to where we were, with the exception of Gaius and Sharon Agathon, which are now the only plot points that hold interest for me.

For a show that's been praised for its boldness and daring, I find myself perplexed as to why the audience was jerked forward in the show's timeline, into a very different dynamic, into something that would be interesting to watch, only to have the writers whimp out and go back to the tried and true of the first two seasons. It's like the only reason for the stint on New Caprica and the few episodes we glimpsed of it was to generate another cache of backstory that we'll spend the next two years learning.