In the grand tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series with a cheesy pedigree and a title that begs people to not take it seriously will be leaving television this week to major fanfare and more than a few tears. Yes, Battlestar Galactica has come a long way from the post-Star Wars series memorable mostly for how embarrassed Lorne Greene looked.

The producers of the current version, Ronald Moore and David Eick, had the brainstorm that the series might be able to address some of the anxieties of an America at war, especially since the concept of Cylons, a race indistinguishable from human beings, seemed so well suited to the fears of terrorists living among us. But while Galactica never forgot its adventure element (though the slam-bang in the credit sequence every week might have misled some into just how much violence was in the average episode), it was in the end, like all the best science fiction, a story of how the average person might deal with extremes of human emotion: fear, anger, and loss.

On Battlestar Galactica, good and evil are never quite as simple as they first appear. Apparent villains are shown to be acting out of sincere motives, and heroes can be capable of capricious behavior and even cruelty. President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) is clearly a sympathetic character but has had occasion to act out of selfish motives, even if she tells herself, and we half believe, that a greater good was served. Admiral Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos) is brave to a fault but can be stubborn, dismissive of all advice that doesn't come from his best friend Tigh, none too comfortable with the messiness of democracy, and emotional when the times call for steadiness. And the Cylons themselves proved to have factions, a discovery that a desperate Adama attempted to use for his own ends as he forged a very unlikely alliance with a rebel Cylon element.

This past week's episode, which was technically the first part of the finale, began in a strange way: with an extended flashback showing several of the main characters on Caprica, shortly before the Cylons destroyed it and almost everyone who lived there. The vignettes seemed to be random, possibly because the payoff for those scenes won't come until Friday's finale. But the mundane nature of the lives shown carried a poignancy, as it served as a reminder that the characters who have been running for their lives nonstop for several years were just plain folks not long before. And whenever extras popped up in crowd scenes, the thought occurred: all of these people are now dead.

It was the dream of finding a safe haven on Earth (which on Galactica was a planet that existed in a semi-legendary haze) that kept the crew of the ship and the thousands of civilians under the protection of Galactica going through all of the deprivation and nonstop tension. When the promise of Earth proved to be a cruel mirage -- a planet that itself had suffered a holocaust thousands of years before and was uninhabitable -- the characters responded not with cliches about never giving up or honoring the memories of those who have gone before, but in the most human of ways. They gave in to despair and began fighting each other, the sorts of things you would expect to see from people who now believe they have wasted their pasts and have lost hope in the future.

The emotional high point of the current season was the mutiny that encompassed a significant percentage of the key officers on Galactica and was barely defeated by Adama and those loyal to him. In a manner similar to how the series opened up over the years to show us the "humanity" of Cylon-kind (and the Cylons had their own mutiny in the first half of the season), this rebellion didn't simply take the position of the brave, stalwart Adama facing down his craven and power-hungry opponents. The mutineers, we came to see, operated from varied motives: some of them were simply bent on revenge, but others, feeling that the surviving humans had been led astray by Adama and the civilian government and sincerely believing that no cooperation with Cylons could ever be possible, saw the uprising as a true last resort. The quashing of the mutiny brought with it virtually no sense of triumph.

Subsequent weeks have brought little to cheer about. The prospect that crusty old Tigh and his Cylon Six lover would become parents was dashed. The only (?) human/Cylon hybrid, the toddler Hera, was kidnapped by Cylons who are trying to extract some sort of answers from her. And even if the fleet wanted to keep running, they are about out of options as Galactica is literally coming apart at the seams. It has been a bleak half-season, and the open question is whether the producers intend to end things in keeping with the air of nonstop gloom, or if we're going to get the Galactica version of a happy ending (which could involve the black hole we heard about last week).

What is likely to happen on the finale? For the first three years of the series, it was assumed that a resolution would be found on Earth, but that worked out so badly that some now feel that the show might opt for a truly dark ending, with the human race unable to find safe haven and with the Adama mission to rescue Hera failing with everyone's death. I suspect a middle ground. There will almost certainly be the deaths of beloved characters in the finale and not just the long-expected death of Laura Roslin, nearing the end of her fight with cancer. But I expect we will see some sort of human/Cylon coexistence, which the series has been pointed toward for the second half of its life. Like the characters on this series, we all want to believe that all of this has been angling toward something positive, in its fitful way.

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