You know all those stories that came out about two weeks ago about how March Madness reduces productivity at American companies and that with CBS streaming the games free online will cost corporate America some $4 billion dollars? Well, that’ll be nothing compare with the legion of SciFi fans who tune in to the early showing of Battlestar Galactica’s early online showing at 12:00 p.m. today. Well, ok, maybe not, but those in the know will be logging on to SciFi.com to catch a sneak premier of the final season, well before tonight’s 10:00 p.m. cable run.
The show has a cultish devotion and touches on social and spiritual matters in a way that other science-fiction shoots for, yet fails to do. Heck, the new season has been heralded by nothing short of a recreation of DaVinci’s “Last Supper” in the pages of Entertainment Weekly; a spread that is rumored to have great meaning, a rumor Starbuck herself, Katee Sackhoff rebuffed on a recent conference call. The show itself is watching a form of outer-space jihad, with the monotheistic Cylons looking to convert or kill the polytheist humans.

So, it’s no surprise that we here at Idol Chatter love the show for its never-ending supply of philosophical, ethical, and faith-based subject matter. But as Jamie Bamber, the newly civilian Lee Adama, said in an October conference call, “The aim, I would say, of Battlestar is to really make a stink about our own civilization and what we do to ourselves, you know, on this planet.”
“I think our show works best in the cut and thrust of sociopolitical drama, and the decisions that humans have to make rather than suddenly, you know, feeling like we’re all on some preordained odyssey through space and time to the founding of humanity as a dictator, some, you know, monotheistic creator that we haven’t yet met.”
Jamie has a point. How many of us prefer the stand-alone “X-Files” episodes to the heavy-handed, requisite mythology episodes? But, maybe, just maybe, that’s why producers Ron Moore and David Eick are taking our beloved “Battlestar” away from us so soon; they don’t want the audience to become complacent about the stories they are telling. Besides, we are sure that the “Battlestar” prequel “Caprica,” which is slated to begin production this spring, will give us plenty to work with and give us a nice fracking fix.