Slowly Going Bald

"Battlestar Galactica" has always provided some of the best action on TV, not least because even though it's a sci-fi show, the guns still fire bullets and people still die in horrible ways. Similarly, the special effects are carefully constructed to tell the story but never override it; the beauty of the dogfights is partly that they're not just pretty explosions happening for no reason. The effects are remarkably detailed, too, right down to the "No Step" warning on the Viper cockpits. But the remaining humans have managed to stay mostly out of the way of the Cylons since escaping New Caprica, which would have made it understandable and even acceptable if the two-part finale of the show's third season had been a sprawling war arc that stretched from space to planet. But how did the show wrap up the season? Buckle up, kids:

Courtroom drama.

Of course, even when "Battlestar Galactica" isn't dealing with actual battles, it doesn't exactly slow down, merely trades the kinetic excitement of war for the deeper stories that explore the lives and motivations of the main characters. "A Day in the Life" was fantastic at this, reveling in the details of Admiral Adama's ongoing grief over his wife and the cracks spreading slowly between Chief Tyrol and Cally (but if she's willing to stay with him after he broke her jaw during a hallucinatory daydream, they can probably get through squabbles about who has to feed the baby). After setting up the show's mythology as the season's endgame — Tyrol's connection with the temple, Starbuck's connection with the, um, temple — the show made an abrupt left turn by doing two pretty huge things right in a row: Starbuck died, and Baltar got his trial.

The two-part finale, ominously titled "Crossroads" just to make sure we get that some pretty important crap is about to hit the fan, was nothing less than a 90-minute treatise on ethics and morality and how we define those very concepts that form the bedrock of our society. That's not to say it didn't do other things that TV dramas usually do (and do them pretty damn well). The strength of "Battlestar Galactica" is that it can do both: function as a tautly designed, structurally sound, emotionally resonant drama, and also reach for the bigger issues above the treetops.

It's a loose rule — very loose — that TV dramas thrive on change in a stable environment, while TV comedies thrive on stasis in stable environment. For one of many instances, the creators of "Friends" had to keep coming up with ways to keep Ross and Rachel in order to preserve the stasis of the group. (Chandler and Monica were allowed to hook up and stay together because of the corollary that allows secondary relationships to work out while the show's primary relationship continuously fails and succeeds in fits. This is why Tyrol and Cally are married, but Apollo and Starbuck will always have to find their way back to each other.) "Cheers" was 10 years in a bar, "Seinfeld" almost 10 years in a coffee shop, and both series thrived on the inherent unchangeability of their characters: Jerry is pretty much always going to be a germophobic prick, while George will always manage to repel women. The characters in a comedy stay, fundamentally, at the same emotional level throughout the series; Jim and Pam can try all they want, but it ain't gonna happen. However, characters in good dramas progress through an emotional arc over the sourse of the series, so that while their surroundings stay the same, they become different people as a result of their jobs, relationships, etc. The soapy on-again/off-again nature of TV relationships has a lot more gravity on dramas because they characters aren't simply marking time until the finale, when the leads can finally be together; these characters are actually experiencing all this pain, this heartbreak, and as a result they slowly become different people. Off the top of my head, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" probably did as good a job as any show ever did of showing marked change in its characters from pilot to finale: The lessons learned in one season were applied to the next, which raised the stakes, and so on.

However, the trick is pulling those characters through arcs of change without violating the story's natural feel. Perhaps the most egregious example (again, off the top of my head and glancing intermittently at my DVD shelf) is the horrible way that Aaron Sorkin kept Dana and Casey apart on the second season of "Sports Night" by concocting Dana's Dumbass Dating Plan, which forced Casey to feel ashamed for loving Dana and encouraged him to pursue other women, which of course he did. The characters weren't kept apart as a result of any growth or change they went through or any kind of relationship problems; they were just kept apart.

All of which is a long way to say that "Battlestar Galactica" showed once again how smart it is at making its characters grow while also putting them through the relational ringer. Admiral Adama and President Roslin have been growing closer since the evacuation from New Caprica, which has been kind of cute: They're old, and slow, and Adama will look at Roslin and growl, and Roslin will look back at Adama like a playful librarian, and maybe they'll hold hands, and etc. But in order to keep them from getting together (ew) just yet, the show needed a way to keep them apart, and it did so the best way possible: It established their conflicting ideologies over the fate of Gaius Baltar.

The trial itself was masterful in that it forced Lee to test himself like he never has before. Sure, he's rebelled several times in the past, and was barely on speaking terms with his father when the series began. But his acts of independence have always been in line with a belief that the military he serves can and should be the best force of good for the struggling society that's slowly making its way to the promised land of Earth. He went with Roslin to Kobol because he believed her, not because he stopped believing in the cause. But he turned in his wings and quit the service because he didn't like where Admiral Adama was taking things, especially when Adama expressed his belief that Gaius Baltar didn't deserve a fair trial. Lee hated Baltar as much as everyone else, but he wasn't willing to let his distaste for the man color his loyalty to the ideal of a free society. Lee's impassioned speech on the stand was fantastic: He spoke of salvation, and atonement, and the hypocrisy of letting everyone be covered by Roslin's amnesty except for Baltar, who had been made to suffer. He doesn't attempt to excuse Baltar's crimes, nor does his speech quite falter and slip into the murky areas of relativism, i.e., we all made mistakes, so Baltar can make them, too. No, he's arguing the opposite: We've all been forgiven, and Baltar deserves the same pardon.

Lee's speech won over Admiral Adama, demonstrating the old man's ability to grow and change, to mature. And Adama's vote to acquit Baltar in turn pushed Adama and Roslin farther away in a heartbreakingly natural way. While they will probably work back toward a close friendship in the future — hey, they got through the civil war of the show's second season — it won't be easy. "Battlestar Galactica" doesn't cheat like that; reconciliations here are hard-earned.

All of which makes it so much harded to accept that, for now, the show is gone for a while. Instead of beginning its fourth season this fall, the series isn't returning until January 2008, which is just an ungodly amount of downtime for one of the best dramas on TV. The series deals with politics and religion and what it means to live in a free society and what kind of laws we give ourselves, and it does it better than anybody else in the game. The finale relied on "All Along the Watchtower" as a plot device and as the soundtrack to the impending Cylon attack that filled the episode's final seconds, and the use of the song was an effective way to emotionally tie the fictional world to ours. It's not exactly a new trick — Stephen King also used "Hey Jude" to eerie effect in The Gunslinger — but it still managed to lend the sequence a weight, a sense of foreboding, that drove home the revelation of the identities of four of the remaining Cylon models (about which I'm sure I will write at length over this long, hot, empty summer). It's enough to make me want to dive back into the show on DVD. I'm really going to miss it.