When did Battlestar Galactica loose the plot?

MOH wrote: »

how the hell did Balthar get off Earth.

Wasn't there a scene where he talked himself onto a transport ?

In fairness it is probably nigh on impossible to write a 'watertight' story arc for a US television series. J. Michael Straczynski tried to do so with Babylon 5 and twice he was forced to amend it due to commercial reasons; first with the replacement of Michael O'Hare by Bruce Boxleitner in season two and more significantly when he thought that the series was going to be cancelled after the forth season, resulting in the closing off of the main story lines and when the series was renewed at the last minute for a fifth season, they essentially had to create new plot lines.

A series can be cancelled at any point, even before the end of a season, although if it does this sometimes gives the writers some time to give the audience a (often messy) resolution, such as that in the US version of Life on Mars. Or it can be extended, which can cause problems to a story arc as it can cause a painful drawing out of the principle arc and/or the introduction of new plot lines. And of course, to keep ratings up, and avoid cancellation, new elements, characters or plot lines sometimes need to be parachuted in; with Star Trek Voyager's introduction of Jeri Ryan or the Xindi arc in Star Trek Enterprise being cases in point.

And of course sometimes a story arc has to be amended whenever the actor can no longer play the part (Lucy Lawless wanted to leave BSG and in Lost Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros were essentially fired after a drink driving incident). I believe these are called 'trap doors' in the business.

My understanding of both BSG and Lost is that they both had very rough story arcs developed at the start. Some elements were always planned (the first scene in the pilot and final scene in the finale with Jack Shephard's eyes opening/closing respectively was always planned), but much of it was made up on a season-to-season basis.

While I still consider it an excellent series to the end, BSG handled this a bit messily, TBH. Number Seven and the Final Five were just ways of explaining the unseen Cylon models that we'd been promised. Then of course they had to tie up loose ends where it came to the Cylons being unable to reproduce; ergo Caprica Six's miscarriage and Tyrol's cuckolding. Deus ex machina was employed extensively too in both BSG and Lost to messily tie up loose ends. Overall, it cannot be denied that BSG was possibly even worse than Lost in this, with some devices (most notably the abandonment of technology for some bizarre reason) making little or no sense - at least Lost created a 'purgatory' arc that tied up nicely, to distract people from the fact that much of the principle arc made no sense.

Personally, I think this occurred to BSG in Season three with the introduction of the Final Five, the writing out of D'Anna Biers and, I suspect, with the New Caprica and Pegasus arcs wrapped up the writers were at a loss as to what to do next.