Relative goodness of "Battlestar Gallactica" seasons (No spoilers!))

Cafe Society
1

REPEAT: NO SPOILERS! Please post only subjective relative rankings of the quality of the show’s seasons.

Okay, okay, I’m a little behind here. I finally got around to watching some “Battlestar Gallactica”. I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, and I’m partway through the second. I have a question for those who have seen the entire series.

What is the ranking, from best to worst, of the seasons? (in your humble opinion, obviously…)

I ask because I don’t want to waste time watching all these episodes if the series goes all to hell. I learned my lesson with another sci-fi series I watched a while back…

I mean, could “Heroes” have gotten any worse by the end?

Please spoiler-box any commentary beyond a simple quantitative ranking of the seasons. If I do end up watching more, I don’t want to know anything like “Season 4 was very weird, but still pretty good” or whatever, because to me that is itself a spoiler that would color my watching of that season. Spoilers are a gray area, and I tend to prefer as clean a slate as possible when watching stuff. I had a doofus once tell me something about “The Wire”: (A “The Wire” spoiler obviously coming…)

[spoiler]Doofus: Oh, you’re watching “The Wire”? Have you gotten to the best scene ever on TV?
Me: I don’t know, but don’t tell me anything.
Doofus: Well, what season are you in. I think it’s in Season 3.
Me: I’m in Season 3, and please stop talking.
Doofus: Don’t worry – I won’t spoil anything for you. Just wait, though, until this awesome scene. I think it’s in Season 3… anyway, it’s an epic showdown. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.
Me: DAMMIT!

And of course, when a showdown did happen, I knew it would have to be worthy of being called “epic”, so I knew immediately what was going to happen, even though he didn’t tell me anything specific.[/spoiler]
So, yeah, none of that please. Unless after so many posts I decide to give up on BG, in which case… :slight_smile:

Thanks for your rankings!

2

I’d say do not watch the last episode. How many episodes before that you should also not watch might be open to debate.

3

I would say, watch it all. The plot seems to become a bit less cohesive in series 3 + 4, but there is still plenty to enjoy.

It doesn’t really compare to the way Heroes dropped off.

4

Miniseries+Season1+Season2 are some of the most amazing scifi to come out in recent memory, the whole thing has the feel of a classic sci fi novel.

Season3 starts off VERY strong with one of my favorite moments of the whole series in an early episode, it then meanders a little getting poorer near the end. I didn’t like Season4 all that much, it felt like they had run out of steam and had improbable hookups and reveals and stuff like that.

If you don’t watch Seasons1 and 2 you will miss out, seriously. If you love scifi you will love this show.

5

Watch them all. There were some weaker moments, but nothing that wasn’t worth my time to watch. I’ve been pondering re-watching BSG, after I finish re-watching B5.

What sci fi series was it that disappointed you?

6

BSG never gets anywhere near as bad as “Heroes,” despite the invective that some fans heap upon the fourth season. Personally, I’d rank the seasons 2, 1, 3, 4, with the first two seasons nearly tied as some of the best television ever produced. It definitely gets shakier near the end, but IMO ended reasonably satisfactorily.

7

Yeah, I’d concur with this. My husband and I just finished watching the whole series for the first time, and while we had a couple of “WTF?” moments, overall we were pretty happy with the whole thing and were glad we watched it all.

8

The finale was horrible.

Second half of Season 4 goes downhill.

Seasons 2&3 are pretty good to great.

Season 1 was good enough to hook me on the series.

9

The first two seasons were great. The third season wasn’t as good, but was still better than most other TV. The fourth season started off OK, but then slid down from there to culminate in an absolute crescendo of bad in the final episode.

10

Season 1 reignited my love for Sci Fi - up to then I felt the genre had run out of steam. The first half of Season 2 was every bit as good as Season 1 if not better. The second half of season 2 had its first bad episodes and they happened to be back to back so the show felt like it was losing steam but it ended up leading nicely into the first part of season 3 which was far and away the best stuff produced by the show.

The finale was good but the argument Oakminster and Chronos are dying to make is legitimate. After watching Caprica (I’m probably one of only 3 people that watched it) I have a different perception of the finale. It’s pure speculation and at some point I may start a thread discussing it - but that’s for another day.

11

I didn’t get to watch it when it was current, so I ended up watching the entire 4-season run on Netflix over the course of a little over a month. The one big thing I can say is that I have never before found myself so invested in a show’s characters as I was with BSG. I thought it was just amazing, acting- and story-wise.

That said, the fourth season felt “rushed” to me, as if they’d gotten word that the series wouldn’t be renewed for a fifth season and they were trying to make sure they could finish the story satisfactorily.

12

I thought the 4th season was the best - every episode is fantastic, drives the story forward at a breakneck speed, with plenty of twists, towards what I thought was a brilliant conclusion.

The show is really never better than the first half of the second season, or the first few episodes of season 3, but the back half of both seasons are a fair bit weaker.

I’d say:
Season 4
Season 2
Season 1
Season 3

Unfortunately “The Plan” was a bit of a dud, and I haven’t yet made it all the way through Caprica, although I’ve heard it gets a lot better as the season progresses.

13

Thanks for the input, all. I think I’ll keep watching for the time being. It was presumably those few weak episodes in Season 2 mentioned up-thread that I watched to prompt this thread. And thanks to everyone except Monkey Chews for understanding what “no spoilers” means.

(I also now see that I misspelled “Galactica” in my OP. Oops.)

14

Seasons 1 and 2 are very good. Season 3 starts okay, ends up standing before the cliff of awful. Season 4 jumps right off. It deserves every bit of hate it gets, and more, since apparently at least one person didn’t get the memo on how bad it was. The series took all of the currency it earned in seasons 1 and 2, took a giant dump on that currency, and then set it on fire. Even Happy Days, the show that literally invented the term jumping the shark, had a smaller quality discrepancy than what we see from early BSG to season 4.

15

Apologies for anything I spoiled there - I hate spoilers myself and certainly didn’t mean to. But to be honest I’m not sure what I spoiled. I was trying to stick to describing the quality of the show over its lifetime, not any of the content. Not arguing with you here, I’m just genuinely confused and would appreciate if you could let me know where the spoilers are, as I hate the thought I might have ruined some of your enjoyment of the show.

16

I say stick it out to the end. I liked the Finale a lot.

The show did start to get a bit weaker in the last season compared to seasons one and two. But I thought they ended it just fine.

17

Pretty much the 1978 was the only decent season. Galactica 1980 and everything afterwards was pure dreck. :stuck_out_tongue:

18

I can see where those who watched it over a 5 year period have a different view from me. I watched it last year on the SyFy channel over about 6 months.
My view is that the quality of the series didn’t decrease significantly. Also, there have been a number of complaints I’ve heard about the addition of certain viewpoints and aspects* and my feeling is that they’d always been there, throughout the whole series.

*sorry to be so vague here, but you don’t want spoilers.

19

Season 1 was good. Early/mid Season 2 was solid as well and grew the series a bit more. Late Season 2/early Season 3 was really the peak, though oddly one of the worst episodes is in this stretch. Mid Season 3 drags. Late Season 3 picks up again and it maintains a good show until the end, with some hits and misses.

ETA: In light of Ender’s post, I’ll add that I watched most of it on DVD over a few months rather than over five years, due to starting the series, then not having cable for an extended period.

20

I suspect he thought “The Plan” was something from the show and didn’t realize that it was the actual title of a … whatever you call a semi-stand-alone-but-not-really moviesode.