Season 3
Battlestar Galactica Season 3: Analysis
The third season began with a powerful political and religious theme. See: Wholly Jihad. One religious theme explored by Battlestar Galactica in season 3 is the nature of God and other is retribution.
There is no question that the start of the third season Battlestar Galactica vividly demonstrated the producers’ and writers’ intentions to challenge viewers’ political and religious beliefs.
However, in the third season episodes that take place after the exodus from the planet New Caprica, the political and religious themes from the start of season 3 are given a back seat to other storytelling. Episodes in the latter half of the third season spend time probe the ill-fated relationship between Lee “Apollo” Adama and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. Anyone watching Battlestar Galactica near the end of season 3 will be unable to miss the soap opera flavor of the episodes whenever the focus returns to answering whether the relationship between Lee Adama and Kara Thrace will survive.
All of the time spent in the storytelling on this doomed relationship seems to serve the purpose of setting the viewers up for what happens to Kara Thrace in the season 3 episode “Maelstrom.” Viewers are led to believe that Kara Thrace suffers a nervous breakdown. Thus, she flies away from the Galactica in pursuit of an imaginary enemy and is killed. Or maybe not. In the final moments of the final season 3 episode, “Crossroads, part 2″, viewers see that Kara Thrace seems to be alive and well. Moreover, she announces to Lee Adama that she has “been to Earth” and can now show the way there.
The third season is not entirely rooted in the intellectual, philosophical or the religious, however. Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica also is noteworthy as well for its realistic special effects.
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