Jonah, you are standing by your prediction that Starbuck is, unbeknownst to her, a Cylon. You may be right. If you are right, then it’s a perfect indication that this show has not only jumped the shark but after jumping over the shark landed straight in a dinosaur’s mouth and was eaten whole. Starbuck is the central human character on the show — the personification of everything human, from aggressiveness to sweetness to martial power to motherly instincts, insanely opposed to authority but incredibly loyal and true and self-sacrificing. If the people behind Battlestar Galactica want to ditch that for a stupid plot twist, then I say to h-e-double-hockey-sticks with them.

The crazy and incoherent jumps and twists of this third season are evidence that creators Ronald Moore and Dave Eick really have no idea whatever where to go or what to do with the plot here. It’s not just the weird Iraq parallels that make no sense. People are traveling between Galactica and the Cylon mother ship as frequently as the three-minute shuttle subway from Times Square to Grand Central. When robots aren’t too busy having threesomes, they’re having spiritual visions. And suddenly, rather than following the last remnant of humankind’s desperate trip to earth, the show has turned into a tiresome search for the Five Secret Cylons. Look, when we found out that Boomer was a Cylon and didn’t know it, that was a shocking and amazing twist. Do it again with another character and it’s just a cheap stunt, a way for the show to violate its own internal logic and make absolutely no sense. It’s really too bad, because television really can’t get much better than Seasons One and Two of Battlestar Galactica.