By John Marks. Originally posted at his Purple State of Mind Blog.

I came late to the show, urged on by that indefatigable finder and lover of great television, Jim Hynes, but I watched the final two-hour episode of the series and wept as if I’d been a fanatical follower from the first. I think I’ll miss Kara Thrace most of all, the emotional heart of the show, its starfighting Buffy.

Every viewer has his or her own trajectory with a show. Having dismissed the original series as a Star Wars rip-off, I had no hope that the new show would improve on the material. Having tried and failed to start watching the new show in the middle of season two, I felt vindicated in my original bias. Only when I decided to go full bore and impulse-buy the DVD of the pilot and first season did I finally catch the bug.

Battlestar Galactica worked best when it stayed close to the spirit and urgency of that original pilot, which depicted the annihilation of the human race by robots known as Cyclons. As the show’s opening prevoew reminded us every week, the Cylons “had a plan”. The claustrophobia in the colony of survivors always made me think of a petient trapped in some interstellar ICU, trying to survive a sudden and aggressive bout of pancreatic cancer. The Cylons started out as the disease and then became the cure.

Cylons, rather than people, brought the question of god into the heart of the drama. What is religious belief? Is it the default mode of desperate humans or ambitious machines? By the end of the show’s run, the notion of divine intervention wasn’t academic. In some ways, it defined the difference between this series and everything else on TV. Not only did it take religion seriously. It made it sexy. Just ask Six.

I don’t want to give away too much, but the creators of the show digressed too much for my taste in the middle two seasons, but brought the show right back home in the last one. The episodes about the attempted coup highlighted the depth and passion of the political themes in the show. The abandonment of Galacatica itself was a superb metaphor for a kind of collective death, the surrender of one identity in order to find a new one. But the final hour of the last show crystallized everything and gave each of the major characters a last chance to shine. For my money, the last hour has to be one of the great hours in televised drama.