The miniseries that kicked off the new show, and the start of the new show so far. Never watched any of the others or knew anything about any BSG lore, but I'm really liking it.

Except it has that problem that all really good shows, movies, books, and anything else seem to have. I'm talking about how just about every character is awful, unlikable, and a fair portion of them would genuinely have improved personalities with the addition of a bullet to their brain composition--if only so they would be quiet and not make any further moronic decisions.

They all have their moments when they're likable, and do good and impressive things, but then they invariably screw it all up. It's the same love-hate relationship I have with practically anything considered "classic literature," although the comparison that springs to mind most readily is to Breaking Bad, where literally every major character is a horrendous and unlikable asshole.

The only difference is that in Breaking Bad there's no particular character that focuses my hatred and epitomizes everything I hate about the characters on the show (perhaps because they're all so terribly annoying already). But in BSG that is not the case, and Laura Roslin comes out light-years ahead of the competition. I'm only in the first half of season 2, so no spoilers please, but it is impressive how in a show where one of the main characters is quite literally responsible for the destruction of the vast majority of mankind and undermines the efforts of the other characters at every turn, my most hated character is still Laura Roslin.

EDIT: And now that I've finished the show, some additional thoughts. I still disliked Roslin for the majority of the show. Just about her only impressive moment was telling Zarek that she would fight him with every last bullet, pebble, and anything else she could throw at him. Even the Cylons looked inspired by her rhetoric. The rest of the time, she was still fairly hypocritical and petty, although my dislike for her never rose again to the heights it reached during season 2. At the end, I even felt sad about her death, though that was only because I empathized with Adama so much.

But Roslin isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, or at least in the scheme of how I will remember the show. What is important is the finale. Roslin dying and Adama going off on his own was sad and bittersweet, but good. Kara bringing them to a habitable planet was an excellent use of divine intervention, and her subsequent disappearance was also bittersweet and sad, and also good. But Lee's idea of casting aside their technology, their ships, their medicine, their knowledge, all so they can live off the earth, practicing subsistence farming is beyond ridiculous, beyond moronic. First, people wouldn't agree to it the way they did in the show. They need their medicines to survive, they need their weapons to defend themselves against wild animals, or natives that are as likely to stick them with a spear as they are to worship them as gods. They also need lots of technology and organization simply to survive, because not everyone among them--in fact, not even a small fraction of them--know a thing about growing crops.

Yet instead they all separated into groups, sent their ships into the sun, and basically accepted a slow suicide. Perhaps there is something to that, and the finale wasn't showing us how "life here began out there." But rather that these were people who faced soul crushing difficulty for four long years, and in the end didn't want to bother with rebuilding civilization, and simply wanted to have a long vacation and peaceful death. I would have been fine with that. In fact, such an ending of calm resignation and acceptance, a passing of the torch to the primitives, in the hope that perhaps their civilization will do better, would have been fantastic. Except of course it doesn't fit with Hera's role. Hera, who represents the future of mankind and Cylon. Except how can she, when they are all on a gigantic planet, with an indigenous population probably vastly superior to their own? Not to mention that the humans and Cylons broke up into even smaller groups, effectively being swallowed up by the planet and its inhabitants. And if we are to believe that this is the earth they are on, our earth, then we know that all of them came to nothing, because the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa happened roughly 80,000 years ago. That means nothing came of whatever groups of colonists settled out of Africa, and those groups that did would still be only a drop of DNA in an already existing ocean. So what was the point of it all?

I can't help feeling disappointed. I expected more of God's plan. But oh well. I enjoyed the ride while it lasted.