Attackerlady and I didn’t feel like doing much of anything upon returning to the District outside of cooking a big dinner and taking advantage of post-Thanksgiving slashed prices on DVDs. And what should we encounter at our local BestBuy but a possible answer to the greatest of all unanswered Battlestar:Galactica questions: what was that “plan” the Cylons had, anyway?

I advise you not to read any further if you haven’t seen the two-hour stand-alone coda to BS:G called BS:G: The Plan because what follows is too mindblowing and spoiler-packed for the uninitiated to handle. Please. If you click that “Read More” icon, all will be revealed. All this has happened before. And will happen again. With that warning out of the way: what Plan did the Cylons have?

They were planning to destroy humanity. You know, the thing we learned in the very first episode of the fucking — I’m not going to say “frakking”; I’m done with this shit — miniseries. Yes, first the magical final-five storyline. Then the unexplained magical Starbuck storyline. Then the horrific fuck-you-for-watching that was the series finale. And now this, the extinguishing of the last spark of narrative promise — the question of what motivated the Cylon attack and the decision to keep pursuing the vestiges of humanity to the ends of the universe.

The story itself is an attempt to retell the early seasons — from Armageddon to shortly before New Caprica — through the eyes of the Cylons, and principally One/Cavil, who gets the lion’s share of unfortunate expository dialogue. We learn that Armageddon was, for the Cylons, August 1914 mixed with the Nazi annexation of Poland mixed with the Iraq war: an elaborate and well-coordinated conspiracy to deal a death blow to humanity motivated by the idea, in One/Cavil’s phrase, that as long as humanity exists there is no room in the universe for the Cylon. The trouble is that the machines presumed that it would work. And, if you’re most of the Cylon, it did, as the destruction of the twelve colonies ensured the end of something like .9999999999999 of humanity. The plan breaks down when One/Cavil hectors the Cylons into finishing the job, which exposes the Cylon weaknesses.

And what are those weaknesses? The humanity within! After the mass murder of humanity, the remaining infiltration-Cylons fall too deeply in love with humanity. (There’s an extremely bad retconned subplot featuring Chief Tyrell and a previously-unseen knuckledragger who married one of the Doctor-Cylons.) The version of Cavil stowed aboard Galactica can’t understand why Six can’t discredit Baltar or Boomer can’t murder Adama and so on, so he interprets it as nettlesome incompetence among his conspirators, until — suddenly! — the version of Cavil that arrives on Galactica with the Caprica Buccaneer-insurgents reveals that he too has developed an affection for humanity (taught to him by sleeper-Cylon Anders!) and judges the whole Plan to be an error. As they’re pushed out of the airlock and hurtle through the void, One/Cavil’s soliloquy from the final season (“I want to be a machine, I want to see the electromagnetic spectrum…”) plays ruefully as a voiceover. (Oh and Cavil knew about the Final Five and kept it from the rest of the Cylons and we never learn how it is that the other models voted to return to the armistice that preceded New Caprica, which is the fucking least this standalone needed to do.) And that’s it! That’s it! Lesson learned: you can never escape your maculate humanity, not even you machines! The reason why your HDTV occasionally displays in standard definition is because you programmed all your weakness and error into it. Pobody’s nerfect.

This is clever for about thirty seconds – oh, huh, I guess we really are all the same — and then the next 119 minutes and 30 seconds make you question why you devoted so much time and emotional energy into watching this series. Yes, “33″ was brilliant. The New Caprican insurgency was the most subversive moment of television this decade. Post-New Caprican death squads, the Trial of Gaius Baltar — that was great. But at the risk of psychoanalysis, my guess is the reason why the Cylons are now said to have Started Something They Couldn’t Finish is because the writers are projecting. They ran out of ideas for the show after the Baltar trial and then suddenly introduce the Final Five, the point at which the series irredeemably blows.

Robert Farley recently relitigated the argument that the Zarek-Gaeta coup ought to have been allowed to succeed, as the ultimate outcome of its suppression proves to be deeply bad. Since he said that he wants critics like myself to reply, here it goes: fine, Rob, you win. You know why? Because Battlestar:Galactica isn’t worth the energy. I just spent nearly half an hour recapping how disappointed I am with this franchise. During that time, a well of anxiety began to boil within my stomach about how I’m going to cover Big Afghanistan Week, but all I did was write about fucking Cylons. No more. At least not until the January premiere of Caprica.