Shark Bytes

The show rocked all the way up to the first 4 episodes of season 3. The cyclons went from badass machines to weird wusses. The writer who came up with that female cyclon that talks jibberish in the bathtub thing needs to be shot....WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!

Season four is fixing everything, but season 3 sure f-ed things up when it became all theological with 'the final five will show the path and blah blah blah'

The show jumped the shark when they found Earth and chose to land in -- of all places -- Canada.

This show has been hard-core from beginning to end. It drags a little from time to time I'll admit, but as a whole, it was a tremendous journey. You can't say this series jumped the shark because it was short-lived and never got a chance to. To those complaining it was too dark, too gloomy, whatever, grow some stones, will ya? If you want spoon-fed sunshine blown up your bums, then watch the Cosby Show. This Battlestar Galactica was gritty, brutal, moody, and alluring.

The show jumped with the finding of New Caprica and the one year jump ahead, fat Lee... Sort of redeemed itself with the rescue, but then swiftly went downhill yet again.. Maybe it jumped way back in season one when Roslin was saved by an injection of antibodies from Hera... Only now to have cancer yet again.. Sorry butI am getting tired of both Roslin and Admiral Adama, they are the same week after week.. While Tigh brought the one truly moving scene when he killed Ellen in season three, they spoiled it by making him a Cylon.., Now the pregancy of Six is the icing on the cake.. I no longer watch for content, I merely skim with my TIVO button..

This pretentious Canadian produced poop can't hold a candle to the old version. God, it's so depressing, gloomy,dark and dull. The old one was cheesy fun but I'm sure I'll get nasty responses from snotty little 19 year olds. What do they know about anything?

Two ever good points have been made. The first is season 3 was just plan horrid. It started off with the writers trying to use the show to send a message and then was like a bad crab cake- too much filler. The second point is that the Cylons were supposed to have a plan, its the middle of the last season and there no plan in sight.

However, the show is still the best thing on TV

It's jumped the shark for a while now in incredible slow motion. The main problem is so many of the episodes of seasons 3 and 4 are incredibly padded. Go back and watch Kobol's Last Gleaming and see how they could well combine soap & action at such a breakneck, movie-like pace, it was riveting. I enjoyed watching it several times to catch every little bit. Now, they talk and talk and talk and talk. It doesn't have to be all shoot-em-up action, but things do have to happen.

ok

the whole show just sucks.

the space fights are ok.

the storyline is just lame.

I will admit that I had really got interested in the show early on, but by the third season I was pretty bored with the whole bleakness of the show. The show is only helped by some very good acting by the ones playing Adama and the President, but is hindered by awful acting from the ones playing Boomer and Starbuck. I gave up on the awhile back and have no interest in watching it anymore.

The Cylons don't have a plan, and neither do the producers. Making Tigh a Cylon is blatant retconning, and Ronald Moore admitted that they thought that up during the making of season three. But that was just the tip of a bigger iceberg. Looking back now, the boxing match episode was the when the show jumped, although at the time, I thought it was just a crappy budget-saving "filler episode." I assumed the show would return to its sharp-edged, unpredictable, and visceral self. Wrong. The rest of season three was a disjointed, boring, plodding mess. In particular there was "A very special episode" (Starbuck commits suicide for no reason after a visit from Leoben of Christmas Past). But no one believed that she was dead, because you don't kill off a main character so unheroically in the middle of a season (after all, Kat and Billy got to die heroically saving others and they were minor characters). So it was no surprise when she came back from the dead, again for no reason other than the plot required it. By then, it felt forced. Instead of writing great stories with interesting characters using the mythology as a basis, the stories and characters are now often compromised to service the mythology. Case in point: let's make Tigh, Tyrol, and two minor characters Cylons, and dangle a carrot-on-a-stick about revealing the final Cyclon. There can be no doubt the show has jumped. I can't believe that so many people think it hasn't.

In comparison, I watched season one again on DVD and the difference is truly astonishing. At this point, I'm watching season four out of morbid curiosity rather than real interest. I couldn't care less who the final Cylon turns out to be. I'm hoping it will be Ted McGinley.

While the reveal of the four hidden Cylons was certainly ridiculous and entirely jump worthy, i can't help but feel season 3 was so utterly drab and depressing, it jumped long ago.

Going back on their last cliffhanger certainly didn't help their cause. If you have Starbuck miraculously appear shouting "I've found Earth!", don't you think you should show us, rather than cowardly backtracking to drag it out that little bit longer.

Well made, but infuriating.

Jumped when they jumped ahead 1 year on New Caprica and left alot of things unexplained. I followed the show from day 1 and I am a fan of the original show back in the late 70s. A new viewer would be totally lost and probably flip to another station. Season 4 has sucked so far but I am holding out to see how its going to end. The Bob Dylan song was kind of corny also.

Remember when we loved and rooted for these characters? What has happened to the writing that I find myself now wishing someone would knock the ever present smug grin off of President Roslin's face, someone would smother whiny ass Gaeta with a pillow, and that someone would kicked Starbuck into and out of the airlock?

Jumped the Shark when a real existing rock-n-roll song was used to summon the four Cylons on Galactica. Bob Dylan? Give me a damn break.

Here's one good formula for when a show blows its load/jumps the shark: bring in something from real life or from outside the imaginary universe you've constructed that just explodes the frame. Like lancing a boil, the make believe just can't hold together anymore because you've gone and stuck a giant needle full of suck into it. Explodes it.

It jumped the shark with the cylon sympathizers. The writers tried to go against their grain by writing an episode with a conservative bent, portraying a bunch of peace-niks as the villains. In most other contexts, that could possibly work as a storyline, but BSG began with the cylons wiping out all of humanity except for 50,000 people. The idea that a significant number of them would sympathize with the cylons and try to sabotage the fleet would be like Jews becoming Nazi-sympathizers during the Holocaust. These people are all that remains of humanity (except, maybe, for Earth, but we'll see about that), and the cylons killed everyone they knew and loved. I don't buy that any significant number of them would sabotage the fleet to get them to surrender to the cylons. Humanity wasn't just at war with the cylons-- the cylons were attempting genocide. Nobody is stupid enough to try to surrender to such an enemy. In another context, I could see an interesting story in which the peace-niks are the villains who try to sabotage a legitimate military effort, but not when the enemy starts the war by attempting genocide.

Of course, the writers did somewhat save themselves by having the cylons actually decide not to kill everyone with the New Caprica storyline. If the writers had done the New Caprica story, had the colonials escape, and THEN have cylon sympathizers sabotage the fleet to surrender to the cylons, I could buy that, but before New Caprica, I don't buy any human trying to sabotage the fleet to surrender to the cylons. Jews didn't collaborate with Nazis during the Holocaust.